silliness re: cwt / city names / politics / 'Clue',

[Catlady (Rita Prince Winston)]

David Frankis wrote in
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/HPFGU-OTChatter/message/27348 :

<< To add to the comments already made, one can come across hands,
fathoms, chains, furlongs, nautical miles, astronomical units, light-
years, and parsecs in various contexts. Not to mention that supreme
invention of the underwater acoustics community, the kiloyard. And
that's just for length. >>

December 2000 SCI AM Letter to the Editor:
<< I service and restore MG sports cars and older British vehicles,
all of which use a complex conglomeration of obsolete units, from
measuring the capacity of the sump (imperial gallons), to determining
the 'kerbside' weight of the vehicle (cwts of hundredweights), to the
purchase price (Lsd). So perplexing are these overlapped measurement,
together with American, British, and French metric thread forms, that
a novice is quickly humbled. I love to zap our new employees with the
question: Approximately how many hundredweights in a moon unit?" A
clue to the (non-automotive) answer: word four in the preceeding
sentence. -- John H. Twist, Ann Arbor, Michigan >>

I still remember how that Letter sent me to onelook for definition of
'hundredweight', which turned out to be: 
# a British unit of weight equivalent to 112 pounds. This definition
apparently dates from about the middle of the 1300's. The British
hundredweight was divided into 4 quarters of 28 pounds, 8 stone  of 14
pounds, or 16 cloves of 7 pounds each.
# a United States unit of weight equivalent to 100 pounds
# a unit of weight equal to 100 kilograms 
# Prior to the 15th century in England, a hundredweight used the old
hundred of 108 lb

Dave Frankis wrote in
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/HPFGU-OTChatter/message/27355 :

<< http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/africa/4579905.stm

This article annoys me. I don't mind the name changes which are the
main topic, it's the lack of feel for language.

Below is the comment which I refrained from sending to the BBC:

"Only a person with a tin ear could imagine that Kolkata is a name
change rather than tidying up the spelling. Is there any chance of
the BBC employing correspondents who understand the topics they are
writing about?"

Really, isn't it obvious that Bombay and Mumbai are the *same name*?
Likewise Constantinople and Istanbul. As such the case of Pretoria
and Tshwane is rather different. >>

I hope the BBC radio reporters have an ear for language, but print
(text) reporters need only an eye for language. On the radio, the name
is the spoken pronunciation and spelling changes aren't a big deal. In
text, the name is the character string and the pronunciation hardly
matters at all.

It wasn't obvious to me even that Bombai and Mumbai are the same name,
much less Constantinople and Istanbul. In my junior high, our
substitute teacher was Mrs. Charvonia, an immigrant from Greece. One
time she explained the name Istanbul; she told us that Turks asked
people: "Where are you going?" and the people said: "To the city"
(which I can't remember except of course 'city' is 'polis') and Turks
thought was the name of the city, and they pronounced it in
abbreviated way, so the 'bul' is 'polis', but I don't remember the
rest.

One of the replies on that BBC page is from 'Simon, Herts, UK'. I
wonder if that is our Simon who was an early if not founding member of
the Main List and a founding moderator of Fiction Alley.

The article mentioned St Petersberg, reminding me of an old joke from
the Cold War. A school kid is interviewing an old man, maybe his
grandfather:

Q: Where were you born?
A: St Petersberg.
Q: Where did you go to school?
A: Petrograd.
Q: Where do you live now?
A: Leningrad.
Q: Where do you want to live?
A: St Petersberg!

K Cawte wrote in
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/HPFGU-OTChatter/message/27358 :

<< *Screaming Lord Such for PM!* >>

I thought dead people weren't eligible.

Ms Tattersall wrote in
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/HPFGU-OTChatter/message/27383 :

<< The members of this group should develop and market a new version
of "Clue" using only cooking references, and kitchen items as murder
weapons, i.e.,
Chef Mustard in the walk-in freezer with a turkey baster.
Chef Plum in the pantry with a cheese grater. >>

Only if we can add a complication in the form of a deck of cards, each
of which names a British food, and players must draw a card and define
that food to Americans.