P's and Q's points and questions

Joel S. Berson Berson at ATT.NET
Mon Apr 20 18:20:54 UTC 2009


At 4/20/2009 10:48 AM, Mark Mandel wrote:
>Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
>
>On Mon, Apr 20, 2009 at 9:30 AM, Stephen Goranson <goranson at duke.edu> wrote:
> >
> > And, in any case, were there a
> > reference to pints and quarts, isn't the order backwards,
> sizewise accounting?
>
>Do you mean that largest-to-smallest is more common? Is there any
>evidence for that?

Offhand, I would suppose that pints were listed first, and when the
tab accumulated to quarts the larger unit was added.

Joel

------------------------------------------------------------
The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org



More information about the Ads-l mailing list