Just weights and measures

According to the BBC, the EU has temporarily given up on making the British abandon their English measurements, their miles and pints and pounds.

I couldn't be more delighted. :-D Other people are free to use the metric system if they like; I've had plenty of physicists and chemists explain to me how wonderful it is, and they're perfectly correct that it's more efficient.

But there's more to life than efficiency. There's also locality, and history, and tradition, and poetry, and creativity, and plain old "because-we've-always-done-it-this-way." You can carry it too far and be enslaved to the past, to be sure, or you can carry the alternative too far, and lose what you've got that makes you distinct. Personally, I think the current era is overly inclined to give up good old things. And then people wonder why they have no roots.

Can you really imagine going into a pub and ordering a liter of bitter? I probably wouldn't because I rarely order bitter at all, but if I did, I wouldn't because it's cacophonous English. And what about Three Mile Island? That would be Four Point Eight Kilometer Island. I suppose you could talk about a really slow person "centimetering" along, but it doesn't have the same connotations as "inching," and is a lot harder to say.

English, of course, has molded around the system it's used forever. If the system changed, the language would adapt. It's good at that. It's just nice if it doesn't have to. Shakespeare has enough footnotes without having to explain what Shylock's pound of flesh would be in kilos.

None of these reasons might convince someone who doesn't already agree. That's fine. I like the occasional lost cause, much in the way I like homemade bread. Practicality alone gets boring. Sometimes the majority exchanges their birthright for lentil stew, and sometimes the dead speak with tongues of fire beyond the language of the living.

Anyway, whether from sense or stubbornness, I'm glad England considers their system worth making a fuss about. It's theirs, and after all, why should they use a system the French invented? ;-)