A bushel and a peck

I remember the day they changed the money. In the late sixties or early seventies, it must have been: the UK went from L.S.D. (pounds, shillings and pence, that is, not the illegal substance!) to decimal coinage: prior to the change, there were 240 pennies in a pound, a shilling was 12 pence, a florin was two shillings, a half crown was two and a half shillings, sixpence was, well, six pence, and thrupenny bits were of course worth three pence. The system made no sense at all, of course, but people were used to it, and could calculate in it. And loved it.
There was a serious campaign to persuade people to accept the change: a lovely advert on the television with a grandmother locking herself in the bathroom, and her little grandchild banging on the door, saying "Come out gran, I'll explain it to you".

Of course, now nobody would change back: the old system was much more difficult for performing calculations (let's see, that's seven of those, so you get a three percent discount: the original price is 7s5d: a nasty calculation unless you convert to pennies first, do the calculations, and then convert back!)

I was out of the country when it changed from imperial units (for pretty much everything except pints of beer) to metric units. I gather that it wasn't pretty. And my mother still talks about buying vegetables, for example, by the pound. But it's not too bad: the system makes sense, even if you are not used to it, and it is not too hard to get the hang of it.

When I was in Canada this past spring, I found that I actually really liked the kilometre system for driving: probably because going 110 km/h looks so fast on the speedometer! And figuring on an hour per 100 km makes trip estimation just that little bit easier than dividing the distance by 60 miles...

Temperatures took a lot more getting used to. Strangely, I found the temperatures around freezing made much more sense to me than the ones around 20C: although probably after a few weeks of summer I'd be used to the higher ones too.

Here in the US, for everything but currency, we are a measurement backwater: the rest of the world, it seems, uses one system: here we are stuck with what are often called "English" systems (strange for a country so proud of throwing off it's yoke in 1776!) but are more properly probably described as (a bastardized) Imperial system.

Why "bastardized"? Because of fluid measures. In the UK, a pint is 20 ounces. As is the case in the rest of the world: if one refers to a pint, one typically means a british pint. In the UK there's a saying: "A pint of pure water weighs a pound and a quarter". In the US there's a similar saying "A pint's a pound the world around" (which I think needs the helpful addendum "except everywhere but the US, where it isn't") This seems helpful: a British pint is 20 fluid ounces, and a US pint is 16 fluid ounces, right? Right! But wrong. Because a US fluid ounce and a British fluid ounce are different measures: they are about 5% or so different!

Sometimes I think that things would be so much better if the US would just adopt the French system:-) That is, metric!

Yours, not hopeful,
N.

P.S. the answer is 2 pounds, ten shillings, four pence ha'penny. Rounding to the nearest half-penny. Or 2 pounds, ten shillings, four pence and a farthing, rounding to the nearest farthing.