> "Credoiniesum" 16 September 2005, writes:
>
> "It seems silly to me that we as Americans decide to spell metre
> differently from the rest of the English speaking world...."
>
> "We" didn't decide anything. American English, like all languages,
> evolved over many years, and had many diverse influences. To expect
> several centuries of language evolution on two different continents,
> by peoples in dramtically different socio-political environments, to
> yield identical results would be naive.
<snip>
> Jim Elwell
Dear Jim,
This is a portion of a reply that I made to Phil Chernack on this issue recently. As you will see, I contend that the spelling difference between metre and meter is not cost free.
on 2005-09-07 03.35, Phil Chernack at [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
After reading the various posts on this list I am becoming convinced that people here are becoming “nibbled to death by ducks.” That is, people seem to be so bogged down in the minutia of metrication that we seem to be forgetting the big picture. Who cares if one spells meter vs. metre or how you pronounce kilometer.
Well actually I care. The difference in spelling is a very important issue for those of us who write, who edit, and who publish. Every word of every document that is intended or might even be potentially used in both a 'metre' market and a 'meter' market has to be carefully checked word-by-word to determine the context and to consider if it is appropriate in each individual context. As you can imagine, this is an expensive process. I regard having to edit anything in the USA as somewhat of a nightmare as a lot of my usual editorial tools simply don't work. I have found, for instance, that it is useful to keep and maintain two separate spelling dictionaries to edit between the metre language and the meter language. I once was lead writer and editor of a 60 page article in the Kirk-Othmer Encyclopedia of Chemical Technology. It was a very unit dense article that crossed the Pacific Ocean many, many times as we sorted our millilitres from your milliliters, our micrometres from your micrometers, and our tonnes from your metric tons.
And keep in mind that I am not alone. Every editor of very newspaper, magazine, pamphlet, book, and blog who has an international audience has to consider the word metre (or is that meter) every time that it occurs. I sometimes think that if we could have identified the sub-editor (in the USA Department of Commerce?) who perpetrated this continuing cost on us all, we could and should have had him elevated to tea trolley duties to keep him away from the verbal nightmares that he now causes us daily.
(As I understand it, the UK and USA measuring authorities did a deal, but I'm not sure when. The UK would change the spelling of gramme to gram if the USA would change from the meter spelling and go back to spelling metre as metre as had generally been done in the USA in the 19th century. This was approved by the NIST equivalent at the time but a sub-editor at the Department of Commerce simply changed the spelling back to meter when he was preparing the documents for publication, presumably based on a mistaken idea of the Oxford English Dictionary maker's concept of 'On Historical Principles'. I sometimes wonder who this sub-editor was, as he deserves a posthumous award of some kind. By the way, I think that both spellings, metre and meter are legal for trade in the USA.)
Cheers,
Pat Naughtin ASM (NSAA), LCAMS (USMA)*
PO Box 305, Belmont, Geelong, Australia
Phone 61 3 5241 2008
Pat Naughtin is the editor of the free online monthly newsletter, 'Metrication matters'.
You can subscribe by going to http://www.metricationmatters.com/newsletter
* Pat is the editor of the 'Numbers and measurement' chapter of the Australian Government Publishing Service 'Style manual – for writers, editors and printers', he is an Accredited Speaking Member (ASM) with the National Speakers Association of Australia, and a Lifetime Certified Advanced Metrication Specialist (LCAMS) with the United States Metric Association. For more information go to: http://metricationmatters.com
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