Please quit dumbing down otherwise well written articles for your
educated, intelligent American readers. I am referring to the obvious
and tortured avoidance of metric measurements in the "Turkey Plans Own
'Panama Canal' " article.
Your writer Marc Champion refers to a planned canal "27 yards deep, 165
yards wide, and 28 to 31 miles long". What the Turkish government is
proposing is obviously 25 meters (m) deep, 150 m wide, and 45 to 50
kilometers (km) long. Why do you think Americans are too dumb to
understand basic metric measurements? It is a dead giveaway: no one
uses "yards" to measure depth in the United States.
Another one: He writes of the width of the Bosporus as being "770 yards
across". That is a another obvious twisting of the original: the width
is clearly just a plain 700 m. Can't you just say so?
Please stop this nonsense.
HARRY WYETH
