Replies

>> many people in America have no English cultural/ethnic background

True, many don't, but I think most did, or at least were dominant at the time of the Declaration of Independence and the designing of our new government. The ancestors on my father's and mother's side both came to America about 100 years before the landing of the Mayflower, one side from Sussex and the other from Scotland.

The country's legal system, and that of every state save one, is based on English common law. I believe the system of weights and measures is part of that. That our monetary units were set up as base 10 is probably a blessing, but it's a single exception to what's otherwise been followed here for some 500 years.

>> Quarts/gallons and pecks/bushels and acres/rods and feet/yards are insane to figure out the math.

Doesn't bother me at all. I can work with both systems with equal ease, but I am the one people come to in my office to do their English/metric conversions - the others would just as soon deal with feet and tons.

>> ...or come from backgrounds like mine where we kissed off the British crown in 1776 and joined the militia.

I don't think our independence was fueled by ill regard for the British system, so much as it was a revolt against the Monarch himself. Indeed, the rights that we recognized as being inalienable then were not much different from those Brits had enjoyed for some 500 years prior. The colonists' beef was that King George had ceased to recognise them as being applicable to the settlers here. The only things that were changed much at all were only changed after much debate - and this includes the matter of whether or not we would have a king and queen. I think they went the right way on the nobility question, but it was not assured at the outset (and we had a couple of clans in the last century who seemed to have been trying to change even that - thankfully one of them is nearly extinct, but we still need to be vigilant about the other).

Dave in Eugene