“Entente cordiale” & all that, Part 2
Speaking truth to power: 1, 2 , 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 8a, 8aFR, 8b, 8c, 8d, 8e, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 15a, 16, 16a, 17 & 18
Following Part 1 on what they don’t teach you at school about American and French Revolutions, lets look at some more French connections...
Update: see final Part 3 here.
Did you know that American is to English, what Québecois is to French? Both separated from motherland in 18th and 17th c. respectively, so North Americans speak in fact older versions of European counterparts: they were left stranded as smaller diaspora, while the original tongue kept evolving: I recognise for example medieval French in Québec (senteur and char for odor and car); ‘or’ is apparently older spelling for ‘our’ as in odor vs. odour. There are also older expressions that must be written up elsewhere.
My favourite however is US vs. Imperial gallon. The gallon was made larger apparently for taxation reasons in 18th c. England… Except that no-one told American Rebels, who stuck with the older smaller or Queen Anne gallon (source)!
Another Anglo French story: did you know US almost got metric? I told you already the Franco-american connection is stronger during the Revolutionary War, than the Anglo-american one: so it’s understandable standard metric units of measure were sent from Versailles to Washington. Except that the ship was wrecked by a storm — it was driven into by Brit privateers, although they didn’t know about the cargo — and metrification never reached the US (source and story map)…
Metric vs. Imperial is neither here nor there for me — except I never ‘got’ fractional inch wrench sizes — but one story showed how metric turned out to be more practical. I worked on an oil rig my first two summers in Western Canada. Drill pipes were ~ 30' long: it was critical to measure them accurately as they were dropped in and hauled out from the drill hole; that’s the only way you could tell how far down was drilled, if you’d reached the target and what pressure / temp would be down there. Well when you’re hauling 30' lengths, you can’t tarry measuring them… so we ended up using feet & tenths of feet rather then feet & inches! Out of sheer practicality, not any intention… no time to be pedantic or jingoistic on the drill rig floor, let me tell you… it was simply a practicality on the coal face so to speak. And we jokingly called these feets’ metric variant feeters (as in feet + meters).
