As anyone who’s ever gotten an email from me will tell you, my public school grammar skills are, at best, appalling and, at worst, well, just plan nonexistent. So, it should come as no surprise to anyone that before posting anything on this blog I run it past my good friend, professional tech writer, and editor, Kenneth Larsen.
OK, who is your major audience? US readers? Or Canadian readers? Recommend F first. Dan Savage always says F first.
We’ve talked about this. The order is incorrect. Also, K is an abbreviation for Kilobytes, which is not a distance of measurement. And M is an abbreviation for meters, which is a distance of measurement, but it still makes your math wrong if you could possibly convert kilobytes to meters. Which you can’t. Stop trying.
This proves your order of distances in the previous sentence is wrong. You are using American reference for clarity to your audience even though you insist on confusing them by putting Canadian measurements first. To make your concept of Canadian/American distances work you would need an example of 190 km or about half the distance of Toronto to Detroit, which is also meaningless to most Americans. Good luck with that.
The English (sic) system of measurements end the abbreviation with a period; the metric or international system does not. Naturally, you have again ignored all my previous instructions on the natural order of the world (of your largest audience) and reversed the expected order of measurements here. You would think you would have learned by now that editors are never amused.
Unfortunately as you may have gathered from his comments, which accompanied edits of my earlier posts about my time here in Canada, Kenneth suffers a bit from a serious case of American Exceptionalism. Most likely, this is a side effect of having lived in a very conservative red state, Georgia, for so many years.
Yes, I do hope to cultivate a large US audience for my various musings and, who knows, maybe even finish and market that novel I’ve been working on since 1967.
That said, it doesn’t change the fact that the US is woefully behind the rest of the world when it comes to fully converting to the metric system.
Or are we?
Very few Americans are aware of the fact that since 1972 it has been the official policy of the United States government to provide, support, and participate in the use of the metric system of weights and measurements in all forms of official communications and contracts.
It just hasn’t been able to work up the political will to mandate that the people of the United States do the same thing, which despite vocal opposition they more or less are doing anyway.
True you rarely see highway signs with speed limits and distances in kilometers and both local and national weather reports are still given using Fahrenheit temperatures and wind speeds in miles per hour; however, it’s a bit of a different story in the home.
When I was a kid, back in the Jurassic Age, my parents bought and consumed alcoholic beverages by the “fifth,” as in one fifth of a quart. Ask any good wine drinker today to bring a bottle of their favorite vino to dinner or a party and they’re apt to respond with, “what would you like me to bring, a 750 ml bottle or a liter-and-a-half?”
Soft drinks, too, are more and more often referred to in metric terms and packaged foods are rapidly approaching universal adoption of a dual system for weights. It’s just that in the US we’ve adopted what’s known as the soft approach to total conversion.
For as long as I can remember, Pyrex measuring cups have come with dual metric and American measurements. America labels most packaged goods with old style units listed over their metric equivalent as in a bag of rice for instance being labeled 2 lbs/907.18 grams.
Despite my adopting, against my editor’s stern and xenophobic objections, hard conversion, and Metric over American, our Canadian cousins aren’t quite as pure as you might think in their conversion to the metric system.
Improper word choice (xenophobic). I’m a reader advocate, and since most of your audience is American, your stubbornness amounts to being unpatriotic. ☺—Kenneth
Canadian fishermen, along with most Canadian males, still prefer their tales of power and prowess being told in terms of feet and inches as opposed to millimeters and centimeters. Grocery stores are often a sea of confusing labels with some items being offered at per pound rates, while others are sold by the gram or kilogram.
And while, at first glance, I might enjoy pulling into a service station displaying $0.84 as the price of gas it’s quite again another thing to realize that’s only $0.84 Canadian per liter, which equates to roughly $3.18 Canadian per gallon.
Is it any wonder my favorite expression here in the Great White North begins,
“Hey Siri, convert…”
By the way Kenny, Dan Savage does always say F first, it’s just not the F word you’re thinking of.
Good job. Still not amused.—Kenneth
