A scholar may be able to explain someday how was it we began to misname this figure: 1,000,000,000. Someone might have mistranslated “milliard” from French during the fervor provoked in us by the French Revolution. Maybe, it was just a booboo that stuck. Whether this scholar is able to find why or when we started to call it “one billion” or not, the fact remains. Usage imposed this error, and it will stick for good.
It matters not that everybody else in the world, including the British call it “one thousand millions.” Then, we naïvely ask the world “Why are we so often misread, misinterpreted and misquoted?”
Calling this figure “a billion” has caused billions of misunderstandings, especially in international trade. It can only be matched by another usage of ours: the way we abbreviate dates.
Any American will tell you that 10/1/87 is clearly October 1, 1987 and that is all that matters. However, in England, this would be the tenth of January, and so on in the rest of Europe. We may too often hear this phrase: “They (Americans) are always trying to be different.” We know it’s not true. We are not trying to be anything. We just follow usage even if the whole thing was started up by an idiot.
Another source of international conflicts is our stubborn, deep-rooted refusal to convert to metrics. The way we cling to the old measuring system is awesome. I’m sure that in my lifetime I will never see the day when inches, feet and gallons would be replaced by centimeters, meters and liters. And if that ever happens, I doubt if our people would go even farther and accept commas to replace periods and periods, commas when writing large numbers and fractions. For instance, would we give up writing 1,456.23 to write 1.456,23 as the rest of the world does?
If 1,000,000,000 Chinese changed, why can’t 300,000,000 Americans? Must we wait, to change to metrics, for a rock singer to start praising the size of his sexual prowess in centimeters?
I remember that for a brief period of time we started to pump gas in our cars by the liter. All of a sudden, the system was reversed. Protests were enough to kick out a system that nobody welcomed in the first place. On the other hand, Cokes and Pepsis keep their two-liter plastic bottles. For some incomprehensible reason, most of the people consider a liter too little and a kilo, too much. They would hate to balance things up just by saying 2 liters or half a kilo.
If kids only knew what usage makes them go through in arithmetic at school, by not using the metric system, they’d revolt.
This emotional attachment to the old measuring system causes havoc but also profits in international trade. Conversions abound, yes, but also ways to cheat on conversion (a 0.2 fraction multiplied by millions can give you a lot of pounds from kilos or vice versa). Maybe this is one of the reason why it is little pressure for a real change.
We have advanced in computers, robots, etc. Good start to measure with them using the metric system. Why don’t? Diskettes, word processor screens, fonts, etc., they all measure in inches. These new products have little excuse for not starting from scratch using the metric system — overwhelming traditional usage.
Repeated usage becomes a tradition. Fortunately, we replace tradition frequently. Despite our attachment to hidebound traditions, new things come up every once in a while. In spite of that, popular and modern TV, for instance, is full of old clichés and conventions, especially in the realm of sitcoms. Don’t forget that our TV is watched all over the world with love by people who are shocked at certain contradictions, such as...