Dear Pat,
I don't suppose you would describe your viewpoints here as being more
ethnocentric than objective, would you? "Corrupt"? "Own commercial
interests"? "Paranoia"? Grin.
Jim
--
James R. Frysinger
632 Stony Point Mountain Road
Doyle, TN 38559-3030
(C) 931.212.0267
(H) 931.657.3107
(F) 931.657.3108
On 2011-06-30 16:55, Pat Naughtin wrote:
Dear Martin,
Other than the article you have already referred to at:
http://www.metricationmatters.com/docs/Spelling_metre_or_meter.pdf I
don't think that I can help you. When Noah Webster decided to corrupt
the spelling of metre in the 1700s and early 1800s, he did so for his
own commercial reasons as well as to meet the paranoia of the USA at
that time.
Webster's success with his deception is now so widespread that it has
become part of the culture of the USA and, for over 200 years, it
restricted the population of the USA from accessing many valuable
references from all other English speaking nations — no matter how
superior these "/foreign/" books might be. It was only a little lie at
the time but it has grown mightily.
I hope you don't mind but I have copied your email on to the USMA
maillist for their comments — their thoughts are always valuable.
Cheers,
Pat Naughtin
Geelong, Australia
On 2011/07/01, at 04:02 , Martin Bromley wrote:
Hello Pat,
My company runs a site at http://www.degreedays.net/ that generates a
specialist type of temperature data called degree days. We're in the
process of building an API (Application Programming Interface), which
will give other programmers a way to get data out of our system
without doing it manually through the website interface.
In our API we need to give programmers access to several measurements
of distance, like the elevation of a weather station above sea level.
I had decided that we should use the metres unit for these
measurements. That was an easy decision.
What was not such an easy decision was deciding whether to spell it
"metres" or "meters"...
I'm guessing you're not a programmer so I shall give you just a little
background. If we use "metres" in our API, we're forcing all
programmers that use our API to type "metres" in various places
throughout their code. And the thing with programming is that US
spellings are the norm. Programmers around the world are used to
typing color instead of colour and center instead of centre. It's like
a standard of sorts.
A couple of links that discuss this, for if you're interested:
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/157807/gb-english-or-us-english
http://drabasablog.net/archives/post-133.html
So the en_US convention for programming would encourage us to use
"meters" in our API (which is essentially a domain-specific language
for programmers). And that is tempting.
But we are providing a scientific kind of data, so it seems to me that
it's important to be scientific in our measurements. And "meters" just
doesn't feel scientific.
I came across your excellent PDF on the metres/meters debate and I
found it very useful. It helped give me the confidence to make the
decision to settle on "metres", shunning the en_US convention for
software programs.
Many thanks for putting that information together and writing it in
such a compelling way.
Fingers crossed we don't change our mind tomorrow or get shouted at by
angry Americans after we launch this API and they're wondering why on
earth we spelt meters "wrong".
Please don't feel the need to reply to this... Through running our
Degree Days.net site I know what it's like when random strangers email
one long tales out of the blue, when one doesn't really have time to
respond. I just wanted to say thanks.
Best regards,
Martin Bromley
http://www.degreedays.net/
Pat Naughtin LCAMS
Author of the ebook, Metrication Leaders Guide, see
http://metricationmatters.com/MetricationLeadersGuideInfo.html
Hear Pat speak at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_lshRAPvPZY
PO Box 305 Belmont 3216,
Geelong, Australia
Phone: 61 3 5241 2008
Metric system consultant, writer, and speaker, Pat Naughtin, has helped
thousands of people and hundreds of companies upgrade to the modern
metric system smoothly, quickly, and so economically that they now save
thousands each year when buying, processing, or selling for their
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