Posted by Peter Ceresole on June 23, 2009 at 09:40:55 user PeterC.
In Reply to: Re: Absent posters (Trivia) posted by John Lambert on June 23, 2009 at 05:55:09:
I remember... something like this: 1 ton, three cwt, one quarter, 12 stone, eight pounds. I remember trying to work out how much it weighed in pounds. I also wondered if he was just being funny.
Nope, he was just being rather British. In the late '50s in Leo Rapp's steel stockyard in Southall, in London, that was how we had to tally all the lots... And yes, I'd forgotten about the stones. God, the lives we used to lead.
I once saw a piece that said that the need to learn this nonsense put British school children a year behind those who used metric. I don't know if that's true, but it's certainly plausible. The point being that for most practical purposes Imperial measurements are simply unusable. Certainly one of the things that lost the Empire, first to the Germans and then to the Japanese.
Not, of course, that that was a bad thing; Britain only stopped failing when the Empire was gone.