I was recently confronted with a measurement that I had never heard of.
I was buying a plastic container of blueberries at Safeway, which I found
marked as "1 dry pint." I have to admit: I had never heard of a "dry"
paint before. I thought that a pint was a fluid measurement. The label
gave a metric equivalent in milliliters. So I looked up this "dry" pint
in Wikipedia (as a quick source; I don't trust Wikipedia for a lot of
things) and read:
"There are two customary pints used in the United States: a liquid pint
(473 mL) and a less-common dry pint (551 mL). This difference dates back
to the British Weights and Measures Act of 1824, which standardised the
various pints in use at the time to a single imperial pint throughout the
British Empire. The US pints were unaffected by this and can be traced
back to pre-1824 English pints. Each of these pints are defined as
one-eighth of the respective gallons but because of differing gallon
definitions, the imperial pint is approximately 20% larger than the US
liquid pint. However, whereas the imperial pint is divided into 20
imperial fluid ounces, there are 16 US fluid ounces to the US liquid pint
making the imperial fluid ounce slightly smaller than the US fluid ounce."
What an ungodly mess! Not only are there two pints in the U.S. Customary
System, but there is an imperial pint as well, and the latter does not
even have 16 ounces!
If you buy ice cream, the package is marked in FLUID ounces and
milliliters, even though the ice cream is a solid. I suppose that if you
bought a "pint" of ice cream, it would be, correspondingly, a (liquid)
pint, even though a "dry" pint would be more sensible, as it is a solid?
This confusion is absurd. All of these packages in the metric system are
marked in milliliters. How simple! This is the kind of thing from
practical life that the USMA should be highlighting. People think that
the metric system is confusing? How many people could tell you how many
ounces there are in a pint, let alone know that there are TWO pints, dry
and wet, and that they each denote a significantly different capacity?
