Drunken Pedantry Posts...

[lutonianbill]

... are not unusual on the internet, but my latest seems to have been published on the BBC website. http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/magazinemonitor/2008/12/your_letters_554.shtml (You have to scroll down a bit, mine was next to last

Comments

[wcg]

It looks correct to me Bill.

[lutonianbill]

Thanks Bill, you're the perfect person to reassure me in this case!
I'm resisting responding to Osylc's response to the original article though: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/7759281.stm
He seems to be recalling an error with the Mars Climate Orbiter?
But "missed its target by billions of miles" doesn't fit, and I suspect "stop promoting the imperial system" is a bit of a troll: if he really lives in London UK he should realise all we have left is miles and pints, the rest has been metricated out of existence.

[wcg]

It's a sad day when nobody understands furlongs per fortnight.

[lutonianbill]

We haven't metricated time yet, so fortnights are still OK. But now you mention it, furlongs are (I believe) still used in the horse-racing fraternity, and you might even still find "hands" used in the height sense. We're in a weird changeover situation where even though I can't buy petrol by the gallon, only by the litre, my car's trip computer still tells me my MPG rather than my KPL. I should probably make more effort to express things in terms of hogsheads, perches, rods, grains, bushels, and all the other fun units: but it's also so tempting to express area in terms of Wales or Belgium, or heights in terms of London Routemaster buses, or volume in terms of Olympic-size swimming pools. And all the other non-imperial, non-metric stuff like TOG ratings for continental quilts, Gas Marks for oven temperatures, etc.