For just about as long as I've been following this list, I have had a German pen pal in Berlin. Last week, I sent her something I had written,
and it was peppered with the acronym "SI". She, a music teacher and a lifelong European, wrote back to me asking what "SI" stood for, and of course,I replied with an explanation
She is only one person, but it got me to thinking---is the acronym familiar to most people who use that measurement system?
Metric Commission Canada, if I remember correctly, never used the term SI. It comes up in specialist discussions as to why the curie, r�ntgen, rad, rem, X unit, gamma, janskz, fermi, carat, torr, atmosphere, calorie, and micron are obsolete. These are hardly units that the average person is concerned with.
Frankly, that's why I like to refer to it as simply, "the metric system."
Sure, there are times when you want to specify SI, like in technical documents or what have you. But especially when dealing with people like the media, or corporations, simply "the metric system" is all that is needed.
