The Mercury E-dition

Bojo wants pounds, ounces, feet, inches

THE IDLER graham.linscott@inl.co.za

THEY say that British Prime Minister Boris Johnson wants to move away from the metric weights and measures that came with membership of the EU.

No doubt he’ll make a clean sweep of it and do away with the decimalised currency as well – back to good old pounds, shillings and pence.

Who won the Battle of Waterloo,

after all? Why these Napoleonic measures? Bojo can learn from our experience. Decimalisation and metrication can have devastating effects on the economy. As I’ve pointed out before, in the old days you could get a mixed grill on the beachfront for three shillings and sixpence (35 cents). You could take a girl out to dinner for a pound (R2). I rest my case. Metrication confuses the vocabulary. Everyone knew what a 25 drop-out was in rugby. Then people started talking about a 22. Why seek this confusion? Does a 3.5m putt mean anything to anyone? No, which is why we still speak of a 14-foot putt. Everyone knows what you mean when you speak of a six foot six inches line-out forward. But expresses it as a fraction of 2m and it’s meaningless.

Decimalisation of the currency robbed this country of part of our cultural heritage, the Zulu version of the coinage: ufatingi (farthing); istebele (halfpenny, the word meaning “stable”. It cost a halfpenny to stable your horse; dibilishi (penny – of which more later); uthiki (a tickey, or threepence); izukwa (sixpence); usheleni (shilling); isikoshmeni (two shilling piece, or Scotchman, from a Scots contractor who cheated his labourers by passing off two-shilling pieces as halfcrowns – two shillings and sixpence; ngogo (halfcrown), meaning literally “the price of a woman” (hey, them wuz the days!); ishume (the 10-bob note), and mpondwe, (the pound) which is exactly divisible by two, three, four, five, six, eight, 10 and 12, as opposed to the rand which is exactly divisible by two and five.

Pounds shillings and pence were classified as £sd. “£”“stood for Livre, “s “for shillings and, in most of the world, “d” for denarius, the small Roman coin. But here “d” stood for dibilishi, an important Zulu contribution to our national culture and heritage but abandoned without thought.

I offer these thoughts to Bojo. Let’s have a return to feet, inches, miles, furlongs, pounds, ounces.

Guineas, pints, gallons and all the rest. Let’s have an end to this Frenchified European nonsense. I repeat: Who won the Battle of Waterloo?

Tailpiece

FROM the time of metrication in the Free State. Oom Koos goes to the kroeg and orders a brandy.

The barman pours it. Koos holds it critically up to the light. “Hey, what’s this, seun?”

“It’s the new metric tot, Oom Koos.”

“Metric tot? This tot didn’t get JC!”

Last word

PEOPLE care more about being thought to have taste than about being thought either good, clever or amiable. | SAMUEL BUTLER

METRO

en-za

2021-09-21T07:00:00.0000000Z

2021-09-21T07:00:00.0000000Z

https://themercury.pressreader.com/article/281556588965575

African News Agency