Needless to say, Pike gives careful instruction on how to manipulate pounds, shillings, and pence-and very special instructions they are. Try dividing 5 pounds, 13 shillings, 7 pence by 3. Quick now!
In the United States, the money system, as originally established, is as follows: 10 mills make I cent; 10 cents make I dime; 10 dimes make 1 dollar; 10 dollars make I eagle. Actually, modern Americans, in their calculations, stick to dollars and cents only.
The result? American money can be expressed in deci mal form and can be treated as can any other decimals. An American child who has learned decimals need only be taught to recognize the dollar sign and he is all set. In the time that he does, a British child has barely mastered the fact that thruppence ba'penny equals 14 farthings.
What a pity that when, thirteen years later, in 1799, the metric system came into being, our original anti-British, pro-French feelings had not lasted just long enough to allow us to adopt it. Had we done so, we would have been as happy to forget our foolish pecks and ounces, as we are now happy to have forgotten our pence and shillings.
(After all, would you like to go back to British currency in preference to our own?)
What I would like to see is one form of money do for all the world. Everywhere. Why not?
I appreciate the fact that I may be accused because of this of wanting to pour humanity into a mold, and of being a conformist. Of course, I am not a conformist (heavens!).
I have no objection to local customs and local dialects and local dietaries. In fact, I insist on them for I constitute a locality all by myself. I just don't want to keep provin cialisms that were w 'ell enough in their time but that interfere with human well-being in a world which is now 90 minutes in circumference.
If you think provincialism is cute and gives humanity color and charm, let me quote to you once more from Pike.
"Federal Money" (dollars and cents) had been intro duced eleven years before Pike's second edition, and he gives the exact wording of the law that established it and discusses it in detail-under the decimal system and not under compound addition.
Naturally, since other systems than the Federal were still in use, rules had to be formulated and given for con verting (or "reducing") one system to another. Here is the list. I won't give you the actual rules, just the list of reductions that were necessary, exactly as he lists them:
I. To reduce New Hampshire, Massachusetts,, Rnode Island, Connecticut, and Virginia currency:
1. To Federal Money
2. To New York and North Carolina currency
3. To Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Delaware, and Maryland currency
4. To South Carolina and Georgia currency
5. To English money
6. To Irish money
7. To Canada and Nova Scotia currency
8. To Livres Toumois (French money)
9. To Spanish milled dollars
II. To reduce Federal Money to New England and Virginia currency.
III. To reduce New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, and Maryland currency:
1. To New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut, and Virginia currency
2. To New York and…
Oh, the heck with it. You get the idea.
Can anyone possibly be sorry that all that cute provin cial flavor has vanished? Are you sorry that every time you travel out of state you don't have to throw yourself into fits of arithmetical discomfort whenever you want to make a purchase? Or into similar fits every time someone from another state invades yours and tries to dicker with you? What a pleasure to have forgotten all that.
Then tell me what's so wonderful about having fifty sets of marriage and divorce laws?
In 1752, Great Britain and her colonies (some two centuries later than Catholic Europe) abandoned the Julian calendar and adopted the astronomically more cor rect Gregorian calendar (see Chapter 1). Nearly half a century later, Pike was still giving rules for solving com plex calendar-based problems for the Julian calendar as well as for the Gregorian. Isn't it nice to have forgotten the Julian calendar?
Wouldn't it be nice if we could forget most of calendri cal complications by adopting a rational calendar that would tie the day of the month firmly to the day of the week and have a single three-month calendar serve as a perpetual one, repeating itself over and over every three months? There is a world calendar proposed which would do just this.
It would enable us to do a lot of useful forgetting.
I would like to see the English language come into worldwide use. Not necessarily as the only language or even as the major language. It would just be nice if every one-whatever his own language was-could also speak English fluently. It would help in communications and per haps, eventually, everyone would just choose to speak English.
That would save a lot of room for other things.
Why English? Well, for one thing more people speak English as either first or second language than any other language on Earth, so we have a head start. Secondly, far more science is reported in English than in any other lan guage and it is communication in science that is critical today and will be even more critical tomorrow.
To be sure, we ought to make it as easy as possible for people to speak English, which means we should rational ize its spelling and grammar.
English, as it is spelled today, is almost a set of Chinese ideograms. No one can be sure how a word is pronounced by looking at the letters that make it up. How do you pronounce: rough, through, though, cough, hiccough, and lough; and why is it so terribly necessary to spell all those sounds with the mad letter combination "ough"?
It looks funny, perhaps, to spell the words ruff, throo, thoh, cawf, hiccup, and lokh; but we already write hiccup and it doesn't look funny. We spell colour, color, and centre, center, and shew, show and grey, gray. The result looks funny to a Britisher but we are us 'ed to it. We can get used to the rest, too, and save a lot of wear and tear on the brain. We would all become more intelligent, if intelligence is measured by proficiency at spelling, and we'll not have lost one thing.
And grammar? Who needs the eternal hair-splitting arguments about "shall" and "will" or "which" and "that"?
The uselessness of it can be demonstrated by the fact that virtually no one gets it straight anyway. Aside from losing valuable time, blunting a child's reasoning faculties, and instilling him or her with a ravening dislike for the English language, what do you gain?
If there be some who think that such blurring of fine distinctions will ruin the language, I would like to point out that English, before the grammarians got hold of it, had managed to lose its gender and its declensions almost everywhere except among the pronouns. The fact that we have only one definite article (the) for all genders and cases and times instead of three, as in French (le, la, les) or six, as in German (der, die, das, dem, den, des) in no way blunts the English language, which remains an ad mirably flexible instrument. We cherish our follies only because we are used to them and not because they are not really follies.
We must make room for expanding knowledge, or at least make as much room as possible. Surely it is as im portant to forget the old and useless as it is to learn the new and important.
Forget it, I say, forget it more and more. Forget it!
But why am I getting so excited? No one is listening to a word I say.
12. Nothing Counts
In the previous chapter, I spoke of a variety of things; among them, Roman numerals. These seem, even after five centuries of obsolescence, to exert a peculiar fascination over the inquiring mind.
It is my theory that the reason for this is that Roman numerals appeal to the ego. When one passes a corner stone which says: "Erected MCMXVIII," it gives one a sensation of power to say, "Ah, yes, nineteen eighteen" to one's self. Whatever the reason, they are worth further discussion.