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Dear Cory:
In a country so advanced as Canada, what's with Imperial gallons?
We might be metricly [sic] challenged in the USA, but this is beyond belief.
Red State Gas Jockey
Dear Gas Jockey:
Cory finds it amusing that a resident of the United States of America would have the temerity, given the mediaeval measuring systems employed in that country, to question in such an arch fashion what goes on north of the border. The US, after all, is one of only three countries in the world (Myanmar and Liberia complete the trio) which have not officially started metrication. This puts them more than two hundred years behind France, which started metrication in the 1790s. France! How embarrassing. [The alert reader will have a frisson of recognition when he recalls that Cory has hailed 1790 as the zenith of western civilization].
There are hazards in all kinds of measurement. One example is crossing the 49th parallel: many US citizens – Cory cannot bring himself to call them Americans – notice that it was, for instance, 71 degrees as they left the US, yet moments later in Canada, it’s 22 degrees. The fact that it feels no cooler doesn’t register, since they have been conditioned since childhood by movies and television programmes that depict Canada, if they depict Canada at all, as a realm of unrelenting crystalline frigidity. Off they go, searching out igloos, Eskimos, huskies and husky mounted policemen.
But on to the imperial gallon. Cory must assume you have not visited Canada for decades, since the imperial gallon is as dead as Bob Hope; admittedly, both took an unconscionably long time to die. Since 1979 Canadians have pumped their gas and purchased their milk by the litre, just as they do in la belle France. Hawaii, seldom thought to be in the vanguard of modernization, has sold gasoline for years by the "liter" (misspelled, of course) because no one has the brass to post on a sign what a whole US gallon would actually cost there. But that’s more a system of deception than a system of measurement.
How did the United States go so far astray? Your colonists brought with them an array of weights and measures from their native lands (along with some very bizarre religions). The gallon their descendants officially chose in 1836 was the wine gallon of the early fourteenth century, ratified by Queen Anne in 1706, not the gallon of George IV’s imperial system of measurements (1824). How devil-may-care, quirky and rebellious of them! The US gallon is 231 cubic inches; the imperial gallon is about 277.42 cubic inches. Canada rightly and obediently followed royal dictates and employed the imperial gallon. Everything’s bigger in Canada.
Speaking of the bizarre and of inches, the US has two lengths of inch: one just for surveys and one for other uses. This discrepancy perhaps explains some hard-to-reconcile personal statistics that have been sent to Cory over the internet.
You are accurate in referring to Canada as an advanced country. Tact prevents Cory from enumerating the many virtues of his land or comparing it to the United States of America; he invites you to discover those virtues for yourself at highly favorable rates of exchange. Older Canadians still speak imperial, though their offspring have no idea what they mean because imperial measures are no longer taught. When you visit, rest assured that you will eventually find elderly Canadians who can understand to some extent your quaint, archaic ways should you be in a crisis of quantification.
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