Spelling of metric units of length

I came across this, when I was trying to puzzle out why the US decided to go for a spelling doesn't differentiate between units of measure, such as metres, and the things used to measure them, ie meters

(eg micrometer vs micrometre)

<<In 2009, metre is used as the spelling of the metric unit for length in all English speaking nations except the USA. The USA continues to use the spelling of meter that was promoted by one man, Noah Webster, in 1828 with no legislative support>>

The article is quite interesting - at least, I thought it was.

http://www.metricationmatters.com/docs/Spelling_metre_or_meter.pdf

I also think it's unfortunate that the thousandth of an inch is sometimes referred to as a 'mil' - did this originate in the US? Anyone know where it comes from?

This is widely used in the rest of the world as an informal abbreviation for millimetre. The difference is big enough to be catastrophic, but not always enough to trigger warning bells.

micro-meter is more commonly called "micron" which makes it easier to
differentiate....

A mil is 1/1000 of a cent. S&H green stamps were worth one mil each because
they had to have some cash value by law.

Jim

When I was a kid in Missouri, we used one mill and 5 mill cardboard discs (actually tops for glass milk bottles) to pay the thousandth of a dollar odd totals for merchandise caused by the one cent state sales tax. No rounding was done.

Time Magazine 1935, on mill tokens:
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,748948,00.html

Larry

Troup said:

I came across this, .....

<<In 2009, metre is used as the spelling of the metric unit for length in all English speaking nations except the USA. The USA continues to use the spelling of meter that was promoted by one man, Noah Webster, in 1828 with no legislative support>>

The article is quite interesting - at least, I thought it was.

......

Click to expand...

We are right. They are wrong. Or the other way arounmd. Case closed!

Seriously, there are many differences in spelling between the US and other English speaking countries. The big puddle has allow differences to creap in. Heck there are a lot of differences in the various regions of the US. Now, with the internet and international TV, I suspect it will SLOWLY become more uniform. Just the way the world is. No sense worrying about it.

You say potatre, I say potato

<<No sense worrying about it>>

Hmm, not quite sure what suggested to you I was worrying - it's zero skin off my nose.
I just think it might have interesting cultural, scientific and commercial implications, for the past, the present and the future ...

Unlike vocab differences (like fall /autumn, sidewalk /footpath) I don't think most of the US spelling differences 'crept in' due to geographical isolation.

It seems to me there was a strong desire to rationalise (sorry - rationalize ) American spelling along phonetic lines, and personally I applaud that. It's one of the advantages of having a recent date for the establishment of a common written language. (It's not restricted to the New World, either: The same thing happened in Spain, for different reasons, and their spelling is a total delight compared with, say, French...)
Airplane instead of aeroplane, jail instead of gaol, color instead of colour.... makes sense to me, but I'm not quite sure why it stopped there, why not insted insted ov instead?

However (replacing serious hat!) I think the metre is a different and special case.

It seems to me that when a unit of measure is designed to be usable throughout the world, it partially defeats the point of having it, if different people insist on calling it by a different name.

And it seems to me a bit churlish to insist that it be spelled phonetically according to how it is said in English, which is not the language in which it was named (the spelling IS phonetic in French). To insist on that point is to say "We must win; You must lose"

I didn't realise until I read the linked article that the US founding fathers were perfectly happy with 'metre' as a spelling. But I guess they were pretty happy with France, back then, and with good reason ....

So when it was decided (apparently by one guy, but he had the huge advantage of being the compiler of the first truly national US dictionary?) to change the spelling, it seems to me the ideal thing would have been to see if everyone else in the world could be persuaded to support that change. Obviously that couldn't be done, and presumably it wasn't even tried.

Rolling forward to 1971, when it was more practicable to seek and achieve a consensus: It seems that in fact (according to the linked article) an agreement was reached between the US and the rest of the English speaking world to a compromise: the spelling of gramme and kilogramme was changed to gram and kilogram, as a tradeoff for retaining the original spellings of metre and litre.

However it appears this was politically unacceptable in the US, so only one part of the bargain was kept

I would have thought that would have been an excellent moment for the US to show a bit of internationalism on this most international of issues, and I'm a little dismayed at the contrasting 'exceptionalism' which seems - not just widespread, but perhaps even growing - in the US, at the grass roots level, regarding metric units generally.

I agree that due to TV and the internet (mainly the latter) American phonetic spellings will continue to take over in the rest of the English speaking world (there's no sign of the reverse happening, and no reason it should).

However it would take a ... " ... like, total !" optimist to hope this might happen in the case of the metre.

Electrical engineers commonly use the term mil for .001 inch. This stems from their use of circular mils in calculations. In addition, NEC uses circular mils to designate wire sizes above 4/0.

The term is antiquated and confusing. Unfortunately, EE's continue to hang onto the mil just as ME's hang onto the slug. Like old politicians, we expect new members to pay homage by adopting our bad habits.

Troup,

For spelling consistency, I like German. Same letter, same sound. Immer.

As far as "er" versus "re", in general I think the "er" is more consistent with pronounciation. Otherwise, we'd say "meet-rah", rather than, well "meet-er". I think the French "re" in English has something to do with 1066 and all that.

We Americans like to think we took a perfectly good language and improved it. Kiwis may feel the same way. At least our spelling has dropped useless "u"s (the colour example you point out is a great one: compare and contrast to velour - it's inconsistent), and our pronounciation is a bit more consistent with spelling ("leftenent"? Where'd that f come from?). Makes spelling easier (easire?). Of course, the case may be made that making spelling harder encourages a higher development of intellect (the Japanese hirakana, katakana, and kanji come to mind).

Differentiating something in written English (micrometer, micrometre) that you don't pronounce differently doesn't make sense to me. Unless we start saying stuff like "An inch is 25.4 millimetrahs, as measured by my micromeeterrr" (emphasis added).

You see the problem that the metric system introduces? It's why the world should all use a unified standard of inches, feet, yards, and miles. And I will go the extra 80 chains or 320 perch with anyone what wants to debate this.

Correct Unprounouncable British Spelling! Stop Metric Madness!

Best,

Jim
()

The metric units are seldom seen spelled out in the USA, so the -er or -re ending is not much of an issue. Few Americans can pronounce French words correctly, so "meter" seems to express our pronunciation accurately. "Metre" would just cause confusion.

A few French words like horse doovers and og-rotten have been absorbed into common usage (not really, folks). Actually, I heard a BBC radio presenter say, "The opera Don Jew-an" a few years ago. In this country, we say, "Don Wawn."

We commonly use the abbreviations mm, Km, l, g and the rest, which I think are standard in most countries. I have never seen mil used for mm. Mil is commonly used in the USA for measuring thin things like plastic laminating sheets, and represents .001 inch.

Larry

And then there is the thing I grew up with in central PA.
In the center of the state, is a county called Centre. :-)
I've been typing so much genealogy lately that I'd bet the next time I go to type the
word centre drill I'll do it wrong. :-)
...lew...

Troup said:

I came across this, when I was trying to puzzle out why the US decided to go for a spelling doesn't differentiate between units of measure, such as metres, and the things used to measure them, ie meters

(eg micrometer vs micrometre)

<<In 2009, metre is used as the spelling of the metric unit for length in all English speaking nations except the USA. The USA continues to use the spelling of meter that was promoted by one man, Noah Webster, in 1828 with no legislative support>>

Click to expand...

I think the explanation lies in the fact that in the US there is no government mechanism that rules on matters pertaining to spelling, grammar or diction. In this we are anarchists. People of an academic bent publish books on the matter, and if enough members of the public like what they have to say their opinions become generally accepted. Examples include Noah Webster, Wm. Strunk and E.B. White (The Elements of Style), Kate Turabian (Manual for Writers of Theses etc.).

The National Institute of Standards and Technology, formerly the Bureau of Standards until it got too big to be a mere Bureau and became an Institute, is the closest we come. But they only deal with the definition of the measurements, not how they are spelled.

That's not necessarily a bad thing. In this country women have the right to bear arms. In Saudi Arabia, women do not have the right to bare arms

In my humble opinion, mispronunciation of words does not give one the right to mis-spell them.

Mark Rand said:

In my humble opinion, mispronunciation of words does not give one the right to mis-spell them.

Click to expand...

Uh-oh, hope you're not challenging our sovereign right to pronounce things
the American way

BTW, what's the proper pronunciation of "St. John?"

Metrics


How doo Y'all doo time?

I spose the rest of you divide the day into 10 (hrs?) 10 (minutes?) and 10 (seconds?). You'd still hafta go out two more decimal places to make it work... but I'm sure you've got it all figgered out...


But what I really want to know .... How doo you divide up 365?


--------

Think Snow Eh!
Ox

BTW, what's the proper pronunciation of "St. John?"

Click to expand...

St John (as a name) = 'sin-gen'
Happisburgh (place name in Norfolk) = 'haze-boro'
Wymondham (place name in Suffolk) = 'wind-am'
Magdalene (collage at Cambridge University) = 'mord-len'

There are many, many more...

Sea Farmer said:

BTW, what's the proper pronunciation of "St. John?"

Click to expand...

Sin-Jun if it's part of a surname, as in Norman St John-Stevas, Baron St John of Fawsley, or plain old Saint John if you're being holy

Peter

Mark Rand said:

In my humble opinion, mispronunciation of words does not give one the right to mis-spell them.

Click to expand...

Yeah, but at least one - the spelling or the pronounciation - should be correct! Else how do you know what one is speaking of or writing about?

Wiki link:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_and_British_English_spelling_differences

By expanding the temp ratio it comes out to a nice round 200* in a circle. But shouldn't there either be 100 or 1000?


---------

Think Snow Eh!
Ox

Somewhere on the NIST site there *is* a usage document that dictates preferred units, spelling and abbreviations. I try to adhere to it when writing anything for public consumption. OTOH, the term "micron" is officially obsolete and "micrometer" is to be used. I've no idea how to tell the difference between that, and the horseshoe screw thingie from Starrett or Mitutoyo that I use to measure the diameter and/or thickness of my parts. Though I work with circular mils, I've always disliked the term "mil" as it tends to confuse people.

Billtodd said:

Wiki link:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_and_British_English_spelling_differences

Click to expand...

Thanks for the link, it was interesting! The article has a link to the "Spelling Board," a failed attempt to standardize American spelling. I hadn't known of it before. The outcome didn't surprise me.