One of my local hotels hands out small diaries as new year gifts to customers/visitors etc. I note that this year's version has a section entitled "conversions" underneath the time-zones map. I was intrigued to note that it had different sections for dry & for liquid measure, and that the liquid measure gave conversions for fluid ounce, quart & gallon - but not for pint. On closer examination, I found that the fluid ounce was defined as 29 and a bit millilitres, the quart as ~946ml & the gallon as ~3.79 litres. Now, as everyone knows, these figures would be correct in USC, but are all incorrect in UK imperial. I'll lay odds that practically no-one actually noticed though. Can I suggest that this shows the irrelevancy of imperial liquid measure in the UK? People recognise an imperial pint in the pub, but appear to be unable to relate it to the smaller (fl. oz.) & larger (gallon) measures in the system. What point is there in perpetuating a system where the majority of people don't understand it any more?
