2002-08-18 Maybe this is part of the anti-French feeling among adherents to FFU. They feel that the Imperial units have part of their roots in French units, yet the French have rejected this connection, thus angering the FFU-ites. I think the feeling is strong where the reality has sunk deep that the so-called "French System", meaning the metric system, has literally won the measurement war against FFU. The FFU-ites honour the US, because the US is the last holdout and the only chance they have in any type of resurrection of FFU. Though highly unlikely, even if the US is doing its damnedest to seed FFU in places where SI or metric has been used for decades if not at least a century.
The fact that SI has only a few French units, such as Amp�re, Bequerel, Pascal, and Coulomb (?) that come to mind, is a moot issue with the FFU-ites. It is the fact that the French designed SI and snubbed Anglo units that lights their fire. Kilogram and metre are names of Greek origin. The opponents of SI ignore completely the world-wide use of SI, but love to point out niches of former unit use here and there. As if that is to mean that FFU is alive and strong and in common use everywhere and evil governments are trying to metricate now, ignoring the fact these countries have been metric for more than a generation. We will have to see if a decade long or longer weak economy in the US will be enough to get the ball rolling and onto an SI future. John ----- Original Message ----- From: "Markus Kuhn" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: "U.S. Metric Association" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Sent: Sunday, 2002-08-18 06:56 Subject: [USMA:21795] Re: "English" and "French" units? > James Wentworth" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>: > > That collection of columns is very revealing, because it shows the > > "franco-phobic" attitude that seems to underlie much of the resistance to > > metric among English-speaking people. > > Curious, the kilogram, meter and Amp�re seem to be the only SI base > units developed in France. > > Fahrenheit is an old German temperature scale, whereas the Celsius scale > originated in Sweden. Perhaps NOAA should label the button for "English > Units" on their web site that primarily selects Fahrenheit better > "Ancient German Temperature Scale" versus "Modern Swedish Temperature > Scale". > > It might also be worth pointing out occasionally that the Troy system of > weights originated in France as well, and the name of the avoirdupois > (from French "avoir du poids", goods of weight) doesn't sound too > English to me either, which hardly makes the so-called "English" pound > and ounce any less French than the kilogram, though most of the available > historic literature on these systems seem to come from English sources. > [http://www.unc.edu/~rowlett/units/dictA.html#avoirdupois] > > To counter franco-phobic and nationalistic aversion against the > international system, it might be worth to better document and publicise > the full history of the so-called "English" units. > > Markus > > -- > Markus G. Kuhn, Computer Laboratory, University of Cambridge, UK > Email: mkuhn at acm.org, WWW: <http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/> >
