From: Pat Naughtin <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Reply-To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
To: "U.S. Metric Association" <[email protected]>
Subject: [USMA:34519] Re: spelling
Date: Sun, 18 Sep 2005 09:33:52 +1000
on 2005-09-18 06.51, [EMAIL PROTECTED] at [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
> "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 ³nibbled to death by ducks.² 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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