>I am attending this show in Chicago Thank you for the interesting post. The tombstone example is interesting and reminds me of how legacy issues and legacy thinking are still widespread in the UK.
I am also guilty of this. The following is not a metric example, but it is the same issue: Within the last 3 years I bought a filing cabinet from IKEA. I chose the one sized for the now obsolete UK 'foolscap' paper rather than A4. I have not seen foolscap paper for 30 years. I still felt that foolscap folders are the 'proper' size. My Spanish girlfriend bought the A4 sized cabinet for herself and was better suited to the purpose. I decided that the next one that I buy will be A4 sized, but that will not be for some years. Metrication is now like a tide coming in. You can still see waves going out, but you know that the water will eventually come in. I also heard somebody use the analogy of activation energy in atoms. Electrons may have a lower energy state available to them, but they sometimes remain in a higher energy state because they need even a little more energy to escape. >It is clear to me that even in countries that have >been metric for decades, many people do not really know SI very >well. Yes. This is one of the things that I notice. If there was not so much concentration on getting non-metric countries to use metric, we could be much more aware of the bad habits evident in many metric countries. The use of 'gr' for gram seems to be widespread, I have noticed it particularly in Germany. As you say, plurals and incorrect case are common.
