I agree with Bill and Chris. Hands off old proverbs and old placenames. We have our proverbs like 'You can wait until you weigh an ounce' and the Seven Miles Boots never became xxx Kilometer Boots. A Dutch island is called Tiengemeten, loosely translated Ten Acres, a village is called Vierakker, Four Acres, an Italian city is called Ventimiglia, Twenty Miles, etc. Proverbs about our old money will stay for years to come. And I do have a wooden inch stick (duimstok, Zollstock) with no inches, only centimeters and millimeters. I only hope that the present uninformed backlash against the euro will evaporate soon. It could happen this summer, when the tourist season is in full swing.
The nonsense ifp goons spout about proverbs and placenames makes me sick. I have read such stuff again and again in anti-metric trash. It proves that they really have no rational arguments, so they have recourse to this old hat humour. Readers Digest was pro-metric in 1968, publishing a positive article by Harland Manchester about British metrication. Some years later it turned anti-metric, marked by a 'funny' article by an American, containing just that stupid 'humour'. A later article about the Gimli Glider blamed the metric system for the near disaster. The arguments from the PC party, riding the anti-metric bandwagon to catch votes, were given large coverage. Han Historian of Dutch Metrication, Nijmegen, The Netherlands ----- Original Message ----- From: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: "U.S. Metric Association" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Sent: Friday, 2002-04-05 23:00 Subject: [USMA:19265] RE: Gram of action > On Fri, 5 Apr 2002 12:36:15 -0800, "Bill Potts" > <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > >This is, by the way, something we've dealt with before, in this list. We don't advance the cause of metrication by trying to metricate traditional proverbs, sayings, metaphors, and other figures of speech. They are what they are and they reflect the time in which they acquired their proverb status. > Unfortunately, it doesn't stop the anti-metricationists repeating the same old claims of "I suppose you'll want to say 'his 454 g of flesh'", or "give him 2.54 cm and he'll take 1.6 km", etc., etc., as if they're the first to have thought of it, and think themselves terribly witty. If I had a euro for every time I heard one of these, I'd be a rich man! Chris
