2002-07-06 Markus,
The mixed use of pounds and kilograms is part of the emotional feeling one gets with numbers. One of the reasons kilograms are resisted in newly metric countries in the retail area, is the kilogram pricing appears more expensive than pound pricing. Even though they might be the same amount, something at 1 $/lb or 1 ?/lb appears cheaper than 2 $/kg or 2 ?/kg. Canada for the longest time, would continue to price in pounds, even though the scales were in kilograms for this very reason. It wasn't until the deli counters discovered the same trick works in metric's favour by pricing per hundred grams, where the price now appears 5 times cheaper. Someone might prefer to say they lost 4 lb instead of 2 kg, because 4 lb seems like they lost more weight. But, to say they weigh or have a mass of 146 lb, makes they look like a fat cow, whereas 73 kg makes they seem slim. It is all tricks with numbers. John > > It really bothers me that still many people in Germany use pound! > > It is never used in written form and it is not used in any field where > accuracy matters. It is still used by older people as a synonym for > half-a-kilogram when shopping for groceries. Curiously it is sometimes > also used by the same people to refer to body weight (yeah, I know!) > differences, as in "I've just lost 4 pounds, I'm now at 73 kilos." At > least that was the state in the 1980s. Usage of the metric pound has > dropped very significantly since then, and has probabaly mostly vanished > by now in Germany. > > Markus > > -- > Markus G. Kuhn, Computer Laboratory, University of Cambridge, UK > Email: mkuhn at acm.org, WWW: <http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/> >
