I used to live in Islington (in the early 90s) and they used to do it then. You would order a beer and the bar staff would give you the price in shillings. You would then proceed to look puzzled as you tried to work out how much that was and the barman would then tell you how much it was in new money. It was always a bit of a gimmick and they stopped doing it a few years ago.
I think they didn’t really have the time to go through all the rigamarole because it’s always been a very busy pub and they always end up having to tell you the real price because no one can figure out how much it is (especially after a few drinks). It was fun while it lasted though.
A Canadian example: a great many 1:50,000 topographic maps have distance grids in 1 km intervals but the elevation countours at 50 foot intervals – lending to silly quick calculations such as gradient expressed in feet per kilometer that have to be converted one way or the other to make sense. It gets a bit annoying when jumping back and forth between the newest maps that are entirely metric, and transitional maps with metric grids but imperial contours, and old maps that are entirely imperial, but I’d rather go through the transition than be stuck with imperial forever. (Given the size of Canada, it will take quite a while to re-draft the contours.)
If you want to make WWII GI’s happy spread the word around that the English have trouble figuring out pounds, crowns, shillings, pence and all stuff like that there.
No Idea what the kid would be using as measurement ,but I am going to guess that he or she will have a working knowledge of american standard units. No matter what the manderins in Ottawa want , people are still gonna watch the NFL and NHL , which will give measurements in yards and weights in pounds for the NHL. Baseball will still be measuring 90 feet between bases and fast balls in mph.
You’re in the wrong thread for this, GorillaMan. Up until decimalisation, everyone knew the difference between one penny and two pence, and smart people like me knew the difference between two pennies and two pence. But then we got all peculiar over what we called money because we were trying to distinguish between old and new pence.
Personally I quite like the way “pea” evolved as a back-formation from “pease”, and “a nadder” became “an adder” while “an ewt” became “a newt”. But it doesn’t increase my tolerance for those who can hold up a one penny coin with the words “one penny” clearly and legibly marked on it, and call it “one pence”. Sorry, but your argument makes no cents.
(Btw, if I ever hear anyone insisting that “data” must be treated as a plural, I generally respond “Those are good news”. But there is a better argument for considering a whole buncha datums to be one singular entity than there is to refer to a single coin by the plural form.)
In Mexico it seems that people know what a mile is, aren’t too sure about fahrenheit, buy milk in gallons and gasoline in liters, buy stuff by the dozen, and as far as I know never, ever used the English system.
