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God save the pint!
Power-wise, the British royals may be in decline. But after the European Union tried to flex its muscle in venerable English pubs, beer-drinkers in the realm united around the language of the monarchy:
British beer drinkers found a measure of good news Tuesday amid a flood of economic downers: The fabled pint won’t have to be renamed.
After a long debate over whether the European Union would force pubs to serve beer by the half-liter, the European Parliament decided Tuesday to let Britain retain the pint, the mile and other imperial measurements.
Minister for Europe Caroline Flint called the agreement “a victory for common sense.”
Cheers! 
Topic: Culture, WorldMagBlog
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back to top26 Comments to “God save the pint!”
Obviously it should be on the menu as the 0.47 liter!
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I do however think the EU should mandate all UK beers be sold chilled. Cold beer heute, und “iced tea” am morgen! An incrementalist approach will ensure they never recognize their liberties are eroding.
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In this case, where the unit of measure is less a unit of actual measure and more a particular item, I’m all in favor of retaining tradition. But I still dream that one fine day the US will convert to SI units.
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The EU and better mind their Ps & Qs or nobody is going to put up with their bloody unity.
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Musing,
Your calculation is incorrect. A British pint is 20 ounces, not 16.
Too bad American pubs don’t recognize the British measure when serving beer!
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The EU caved in to those roguish, milk-livered joitheads by letting them keep the mile too. No doubt that those yeasty, sheep-biting bum-bailys wanted to preserve the tradition of the great British milers (Roger Bannister, Chariots-of-Fire, etc.).
The *real* question is: when is the EU going to get those frothy, common-kissing pumpions to drive on the right side of the road?!
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Lynn is joshing us here. But there is an important point. Islam does not permit alcohol. The Brits will put up with a lot of cultural modification to accommodate shirah, but I suspect that when they start messing with their “pints”, there will be a replay of the Tea Party in Britain.
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Pippin: What’s that?!
Merry: This, my friend, is a pint!
Pippin: It comes in pints?!
Merry: Mmm… (agreeing, while taking a large sip)
Pippin: I’m getting one!
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Scott Robinson post 3,
thank you I stand corrected, so it would be 0.6 liters!
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Good ol’ Brits. They’ll take a “666″ on the forehead before they’ll give up the ‘pint’.
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#2
Chilled beer is a rare occurrence in most of Europe not just the UK. While living in Poland, one of the student pubs became the North American favorite because the barmaid would keep some 0.5 liter bottles chilled just for us. Of course she only chilled the more expensive beers.
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I’ll know England is ready to have the sod laid over them the day they relinquish measuring their horses in hands.
Or maybe it’s happened already and that’s what the problem is.
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Kwerna,
I’m fairly sure “hands” is the worldwise measurement for horses. It’s the American measure, at any rate.
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Hands is only used in English-speaking countries. A hand is four inches.
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I don’t understand why they don’t adopt the calendar that was developed to complement the metric system.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Republican_Calendar
And that other great invention, the guillotine.
Maybe they are distracted with the problems they are having with the kilogram. It’s a good thing that beer is measured by volume.
Beyond the simple wear that check standards can experience, the mass of even the carefully stored national prototypes can drift relative to the IPK for a variety of reasons, some known and some unknown.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kilogram
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Where’s Graceland?
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Kwerna,
I couldn’t tell from your post if you knew we used the same measurement, or if you thought it was some quaint measurement in Britain. (And I don’t know anything about care of horses in countries outside America, so I didn’t know if it was the standard measurement worldwide.)
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I still use rods and perches, both of which are 16.5 feet. Four perches makes a chain, and ten square chains is an acre.
A pint’s a pound the world around. A pound of water, that is.
Philadelphia has various definitions of the foot that apply to different neighborhoods.
http://www.pobonline.com/CDA/Archives/2292817cac0f6010VgnVCM100000f932a8c0____
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Amphipolis,
We are all confused. Those of us using computers are now typically running on a calendar based on milliseconds (or sometimes tenths of seconds or perhaps seconds) since January 1, 1980
:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epoch_(reference_date)
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Isn’t there a scene in Orwell’s “1984″ where a guy is grumping about the pint having been changed to a half-liter, which is too small, but having two half-liters would be too much?
The guys I knew in the U.K. would not complain two half-liters is too much. They’d gripe about having to go back to the bar so often for yet another refill.
And I suppose a half pint would be replaced by a quarter liter?
On the bright side, a yard of ale would become a meter of ale. %-b
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Whoa, nice reference John Denney. I’ll have to read 1984 again now.
“I arst you civil enough, didn’t I?” said the old man, straightening his shoulders pugnaciously. “You telling me you ain’t got a pint mug in the ‘ole bleeding boozer?”
“And what in hell’s name is a pint?” said the barman, leaning forward with the tips of his fingers on the counter. “‘Ark at ‘im! Calls ‘isself a barman and don’t know what a pint is! Why, a pint’s the ‘alf of a quart, and there’s four quarts to the gallon. ‘Ave to teach you the A, B, C next.”
“Never heard of ‘em,” said the barman shortly. “Liter and half liter — that’s all we serve. There’s the glasses on the shelf in front of you.”
I like a pint,” persisted the old man. “You could ‘a drawed me off a pint easy enough. We didn’t ‘ave these bleeding liters when I was a young man.”
“When you were a young man we were all living in the treetops,” said the barman, with a glance at the other customers. There was a shout of laugher …
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Musing 19 -
Yeah, right. Like those computers know what they are doing.
Bring up Microsoft Excel. Type in the number 60. Then format it as a date. It will give you February 29, 1900 – because the date indices were set to start at 1 on January 1, 1900. So day 59 is February 28, 1900 and day 61 is March 1, 1900.
Problem is, there was never a February 29, 1900. The day like never happened at all ever (except in Russia, but that was around two weeks before). The Gregorian Calendar (you know – the one we have used since colonial times) skips three centenary leap years every 400 years. The programmers who first established the dating system for personal computers didn’t know that.
It’s fixed for the future though. There will be no February 29, 2100.
My point (before the trivial diversion) was that the French rationalists who brought us the metric system also rationalized the calendar. If we are going to go with French revolutionary standards, why not adopt them all minus the guillotine?
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Amphipolis post 22,
and do you know where Feb 29, 1900 came from?
It did not originate with Microsoft.
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I was mistaken – Russia’s February 29, 1900 was around two weeks AFTER. Duh.
Musing, I don’t know – I first noticed the error 20 years ago on Lotus. It probably goes back to VisiCalc. I’m sure Microsoft just followed their format. They could have made day 1 be December 31, 1899 but I doubt they realized the error at the time.
If the people who first set up the dates started at the official beginning of the century, January 1, 1901, they would have been OK.
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This is so lame. My solution above never occurred to them?
http://www.ozgrid.com/Excel/ExcelDateandTimes.htm
How phony. It’s an example of lazy and unimaginative programming. My solution would have addressed every concern except compatibility with other platforms for dates before March 1, 1900, which by their admission are rarely used. But instead the computers have to change the past and make up a day to be accurate. An entire day. Teddy Roosevelt would be laughing at us.
As for the programming, since they do have to account for future centenary leap years (which would seem to make them incompatible with some older platforms), they actually have to make an additional step to not account for this one.
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amphipolis,
as I understand the sotyr, Lotus included Feb 29, 1900 to make date calculations quicker on low power small memory computers.
Since it was in Lotus, it needed to be in Excel to make it compatible with Lotus.
And for other trivia, what determined the width of standard gage railways?
Historical artifact move on even when we don’t notice.
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