On May 14, 2007, at 8:45 PM, Andrew Stiller wrote:
On May 14, 2007, at 1:12 PM, Christopher Smith wrote:
Yeah, and it's TWENTY OUNCE pints over your way, not our measly
little 16 oz. pints that we have here in Canada and the US.
How did that happen? There's a proverb, which I have always assumed
was very old, that says "A pint's a pound the world round." For
this to be true, a pint must be 16 oz. everywhere. So what's the
deal here?
I think the originator of that proverb was confusing ounces
avoirdupois (weight) with ounces volume.
The reason British pints are bigger than Canadian pints is that the
British used the Imperial system, whereas just about everywhere else
(except some Caribbean islands) uses the system called variously
Standard, or US Customary, or confusingly, English units (which were
NOT even used by the British since the early 1800's!) Even the ounces
themselves are slightly different in size between the two systems.
The UK now uses the metric system, much to everyone's relief. The
word "pint" is used more like "glass", as in "Let's order a glass of
beer" but is about 570 ml (about 1.2 US pints) by convention, as it
is close to the original Imperial pint in volume and everyone was
used to drinking beer in that size of glass.
As much as it was a painful transition, the world is much better off
with metric measures, which ARE the same the world round, and at
least don't use the same word for two different types of measurement!
Now if we could only convince the US to abandon the confusing, non-
standard and minority system of measures that hasn't even been used
in the country of its origin for almost two centuries!
Christopher
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