metric mile

[Wilson Gray]

On Mon, Aug 6, 2012 at 8:53 PM, Victor Steinbok <aardvark66 at gmail.com> wrote:
> Is this true?

IME, it is. Back in the day, when the United States still maintained
the customary 100-yd, 220-yd, 440-yd, 880-yd/half-mile, and mile
races, the 1500m. race - of interest only in Olympics years - was
always refereed to as the "metric mile" on sports pages and in such
publications as Sports Illustrated, to the extent that I still say
"metric mile," on those vanishingly-rare occasions when the race comes
up in conservation.

As recently as the '80's, when I worked briefly in a liquor store,
liters were called "metric quarts" and, when I worked briefly as a
warehouseman, a company marked its standard package as containing
"Four Liters - One Metric Gallon." And there's the fairly-standard
measure, the "metric ton(ne)."

--
-Wilson
-----
All say, "How hard it is that we have to die!"---a strange complaint
to come from the mouths of people who have had to live.
-Mark Twain

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