Belge.Party

Tan sine cosine auld langsine

Also, don't fucking get me started of Reagan keeping the US on Imperial, and how agonizingly stupid Imperial gets with small lengths

Motor brushes are offered in catalogues in inches, half-inches, quarter-inches, decimal fractions of inches, but also in eighths, sixteenths, twenty-fifths, thirty-seconds, sixty-fourths, one-hundred-and-twenty-eighths
On one page in a list of brushes of essentially the same dimensions, there were TWELVE different unit used

@wibble @infobeautiful

I told this to my wife when I first learned about it and her response was something along the lines of “Danish should probably consider just starting over.”

That’s worse. You see how that’s worse right.

Makes perfect sense

@wibble @edgeofeurope @infobeautiful

For pure money, lets not forget that we have in addition to pounds, shillings, sovereigns, farthings, pennies, ha'penny, thrupence, and so on

They ALL had different units - 20 shillings to a pound, 12 pence to a shilling, four farthings to a penny, ha'penny, was of course half a penny, thrupence was three pennies, sixpence was amazingly six
Now of course a florin was two pounds, a halfcrown was two pounds and sixpence, an a guinea was usually 21 shilling

@wibble @infobeautiful

Oh in Imperial it would all change depending on WHAT you were measuring!
This was all just for general numbering

For land distance, it would be in furlongs, miles, chains, rods, yards, inches and fractions thereof
For nautical distance it would be in nautical miles except if it was depth, in which case fathoms
Weight would be in an astonishing number of different measures, and also depend on WHAT was being weighed, and volume would be an insane array

@wibble @infobeautiful

Sounds like a fever dream/simulation the Danish need to wake up from, holy moly

I was going to say four score and a dozen - 4x20+12 which would be typical of Imperial to mix different measures

or

seven dozen and eight

or (since Imperial LOVES fractions)

seven dozen and two-thirds of a dozen

@edgeofeurope @infobeautiful

"So let's take 297. That's to hundrede og syvoghalvfems. Two hundred and seven and ninety. But let's take a closer look at the ninety. That the 'halvfems'. This has over a long time been shortened from 'halve af den femte snes', which means half of the fifth snes, which is rather archaic word for 20."

(So the equivalent of "score" in English)

"So, taking half of the fifth snes, with the four preceding being implied as it would be a bit long with that included, and we wouldn't want this to end up getting silly, that gives us the last 10 after the implied 4 times 20."