can you explain for AB peeps
well turn over an arith exercise book from the fifties,
and it is covered with conversions
inches to feet to rods perches and god knows what
pounds to stone and cwt
square inches to square feet to square yards
oi oi oi !- - - - and to remember them
and and there were three ( yup, that's fwee!) to remember for weights and measures depending ....
depending on what? I hear you ask
depending on what you are weighing
the first one was pounds stone and tons - avoirdupois - er you DO have dupois? - that was for commerce and also what people weighed...
and the second one was for weighing gold - Troyes ( silent s) named after the place ( there is a place called Troyes, you know where the treaty came from)
and the third was for weighing drugs ( which mostly didnt work in those days) drachms and grains
and a grain figured in all THREE but they were er different weights
so if you were treating a kid ( =small human, often found in schools and houses, noisy, unwashed) with medicine - ( that was perhaps after you had tried kissing the child better - mwah mwah all gone!)
then you gave less to a smaller kid ( to avoid killing them)
you gave less in pharmacy grains according to how much the little mite weighed in avoirdupois. ( stone - a stone was a unit of weight in the Good Old Days )
Medicine went metric in around 1965 thank god
yes it really was like that