Why would kids "pretend" to forget metric?
Such a notion perplexes me.
I have young cousins (teenagers) so I know first hand how kids really talk.
I'm not old enough to have kids yet so I cannot comment on any offspring!
;-)
IF you want to hear how brits really talk then thats easy!
Check out one of the "chat" style radio stations online.
A good one would be bbc radio london (www.bbc.co.uk/ldn) and "listen online"
to people of various ages, ethnicity, sex, background etc talking
'normally'. These will be people that don't (like us) take an overt
interest in the subject - thus you can scrap any bias I, or a pro-met, might
have.
All I ask is that if someone mentions 'celsius' or 'millimetre' once in a
conversation full of 'feet', 'miles', 'yards' , 'pounds' etc that you don't
assume this as out-and-out proof that everyone in the UK speaks metric.
From: "Daniel" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Reply-To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
To: "U.S. Metric Association" <[email protected]>
Subject: [USMA:33179] Re: Independent (UK) all metric
Date: Sat, 11 Jun 2005 13:13:42 -0400
If I'm not mistaken the signage style is the same in both the UK and the
Continent. Thus it is easy to make such a mistake. I'm sure Continental
students in the UK make the same mistake in reverse. A member of the BWMA
present would set them straight.
I doubt they forget metric when they leave school. Some may pretend to.
There must be plenty of references in daily life to keep the memory of
metric units fresh in their minds. Maybe we need to find out from the
British posters, like Phillip Hall as to how much metric one would
encounter in an average day. From the morning newspaper and radio/TV news
and weather, the units used on the job (or in school), the units used in
the marketplace, the evening media, etc, up until the time one goes to bed.
If one is exposed to a 50 % or greater metric environment, then the chances
of forgetting it are very slim. More then likely, the amount of metric
used is taken for granted. No longer something that seems odd and sticks
out as different.
I wouldn't take the 400 miles as a conversion of 650 km. You would have to
read or hear about the same subject from a different source or non-English
source to see what it might have been. We English speakers take great
liberties when converting metric to English. It is more important that the
English numbers are rounded and sound good to the ear then to be correct.
Dan
----- Original Message -----
From: H. Maenen
To: U.S. Metric Association
Sent: Saturday, 2005-06-11 10:58
Subject: [USMA:33175] Re: Independent (UK) all metric
And even more: the article might make one believe that the statute mile
is being used in Central Europe to measure distances. Like British
teenagers in a Eurolines long distance bus or coach from London to
Amsterdam that approached the Belgian/Dutch border a few years ago. A
distance sign on the motorway northbound from Antwerp stated 'Breda 40' and
these British youths, who have learnt metric at school but then had it
erased from their minds, because of the largely non-metric environment they
live in and partly because of the anti-metric trash they read in newspapers
like The Sun, thought that this distance was 40 miles!
The miles used in Central Europe about 200 years ago were much longer
than the British mile - between 5 and 7 km. These mainland European
archeologists have certainly referred to ramparts and palisades
stretching up for 800 m and they will have talked about a 650 km swath of
land.
Han
========================================
Message date : 11-06-2005 14:45
From : "Daniel"
To : "U.S. Metric Association"
Copy to :
Subject : [USMA:33172] Re: Independent (UK) all metric
In all, more than 150 temples have been identified. Constructed of
earth and wood, they had ramparts and palisades that stretched for up to
half a mile. They were built by a religious people who lived in communal
longhouses up to 50 metres long, grouped around substantial villages.
Archaeologists are now beginning to suspect that hundreds of these
very early monumental religious centres, each up to 150 metres across, were
constructed across a 400-mile swath of land in what is now Austria, the
Czech Republic, Slovakia, and eastern Germany.
Second, the central sacred area was nearly always the same size, about
a third of a hectare.
One village complex and temple at Aythra, near Leipzig, covers an area
of 25 hectares.
Maybe my math is faulty, but the above excerpts showing both metric
and English in the article doesn't seem to add up to 100 %. I would think
miles are still used because they are still used on British roads. The use
of metres and hectares most likely are used because they are used in the UK
instead of their former units. This may be what the mess is all about;
mixing English and metric units together like this.
Dan
