I listened to a show this evening on NPR that chronicles several people's journey of personal discovery.
The first story was of a fairly young-ish sounding Australian woman (with a genuine-sounding Aussie accent) from the city going into aboriginal territory with an aboriginal guide. Twice during the show she referred to termite mounds that were "18 feet high". I don't know if she thought she was being "helpful" by figuring out or asking for the conversion to "feet" (and note she didn't even take the easy "conversion" and just substitute "yards" for "meters", which I presume is the unit she used natively in her head) or if she was asked by the NPR reporter to do the conversion. Either way, I just wish that hadn't happened. We get few enough experiences here in the States of native speakers of English in other countries using metric, which is one way of raising the consciousness of Americans to the idea that Imperial or US Customary is no longer to be immediately associated with English-speaking countries and vice versa, but that instead we are the only English-speaking country on the planet that has not converted or at least partially converted to metric. Oh, well. Maybe the next program will get it right. Ezra
