Recently, one of our correspondents (it doesn't matter who) wrote about temperatures and referred to values just in "degrees" without specifying Celsius or Fahrenheit. (See excerpt below.) I know most of us on this list are sufficiently aware of Celsius temperature values to know that he must have been referring to Celsius degrees. My question is two-fold and I only have a "one-fold" answer (for myself).
(1) Is it proper, in general, to omit the qualifier "Celsius" when referring to temperature in Celsius degrees? (2) Is it proper to omit "Celsius", when conversing with those who are thoroughly familiar with Celsius temperatures, so that there would be no danger whatsoever that the reader would mistakenly think the temperatures were Fahrenheit? I think the answer to #1 should be "no", although I can imagine arguments to the contrary. I don't know what I think about #2. Is criticism of the omission of "Celsius" in this situation considered unnecessarily picky? Or is the use of "degrees" alone without specifying "Celsius" so wrong technically that it should be avoided even when there is no danger of misunderstanding? (I admit that the problem disappears if we use symbols, " ˚C " vs. " ˚F ", but there are always situations where writing things out is preferable.) Regards, Bill Hooper Fernandina Beach, Florida, USA ========================== Make It Simple; Make It Metric! ========================== On Mar 23 , a correspondents wrote: > In the summer, though, you can have the following temperature gradients from > the beach in San Francisco: 15 degrees at the beach, 20 degrees downtown, > 25 degrees across the bay in Berkeley, 30 degrees east of the hills in > Concord and Walnut Creek, and 35-38 degrees in Sacramento, over a distance > of only about 120 km. As you can imagine this causes some REALLY fierce > winds
