Sacha wrote:
On 6/2/08 17:54, in article ,
"Martin" wrote:
Thank Gawd for the metric system.
But it's so bland, so boring. Thank God for Ye Olde English, if only
because it IS ours!
Exactly. These things are deeply embedded in language. You can't, for
example, talk about Our Hero two-point-five centimetering his way along
the crumbling ledge. It just doesn't have the same ring.
Then, what would we call a piece of artillery so massive it takes two
men to load the shell? Eighty-pounder! Not only the glorious pun on
'pound' but the subtle echo of weighty mass in 'eighty'. Weighty
pounder. Pure Poetry. By contrast, bringing up the thirty-six
kilogrammer sounds more millinery than military.
And it's not just the lexicon, there's the actual physical expression.
Yard! What a wide-open, full man's stride of a word, roared from the
chest. 'Metre' is such a meek and tweety sort of concoction. No wonder
even the French themselves shorten and flatten the e. I think they've
been planning this since Waterloo.