On Friday 09 March 2001 0532, Han Maenen wrote:
....
> League (lieue). The newspaper "La Charente Libre" on Friday 22.2.96
> described a village as being less than two leagues from the nearest
> town: "Le village d'Antezant-la-Chapelle est ... moins de deux lieues
> de St. Jean d'Angély."
OK. I confess. We, too, have some non-metric distance measures that
may never go away: the "stone's throw" and the "hop, skip, and a jump".
> ** Suppose I am from the BWMA and I am in the beautiful city of
> Deventer. They sell spicy cakes there, called 'Deventer koek'. One
> version of it is 'ellekoek', 'ells cake', it has the length of the
> old cloth ell of 68 cm. Another coup! The Dutch don't want meters!
> They use ells! I have that on our site straight away!
> I regard this as a harmless tradition and it would be foolish to
> oppose it. We had an ell in the past, and we remember that in the
> length of that cake.> (Re: USMA 11514 by me and 11515 by Louis)
That's like the American "foot-long" hot dog. It rarely measured 12
inches in length but was roughly twice as long as a "standard" hot dog
-- however long that is.....
Jim
--
James R. Frysinger University/College of Charleston
10 Captiva Row Dept. of Physics and Astronomy
Charleston, SC 29407 66 George Street
843.225.0805 Charleston, SC 29424
http://www.cofc.edu/~frysingj [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Cert. Adv. Metrication Specialist 843.953.7644
