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Admin
Yes, lets gloss over the fact that precious pounds also crashed the Mars Climate Orbiter into the surface of Mars. We'll just pretend those $655.2 million were never wasted from such a stupid mistake.
Admin
Surely that is the result of you people trying to force your silly french numbers on us. We'd already landed the Viking probes successfully without any meddlesome metric units gunking up the works, after all. To say nothing of the Voyagers, our emissaries to interstellar space. Metric has nothing to offer us but suffering.
Admin
Which explains why NASA made the contract ask for SI units...? And why NASA has been using SI units since the 1990s? And why the rest of the world uses metric units for almost everything they do? And I'd like to know what you define as "silly". Clearly NASA has no reason to be using them, since they're so silly.
Admin
The specific words you've highlighted are accepted in Oxford spelling but you have falsely conflated that to mean all -ize words are accepted in Oxford spelling. More information on wikipedia:
The use of -ize instead of -ise does not affect the spelling of words that are not traced to the Greek -izo suffix. One group of such words is those that end in -yse (actually -lyse), such as analyse, paralyse and catalyse, which come from the Greek verb λύω, lyo. Others include arise, chastise, disguise, prise (in the sense of open), and televise. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxford_spelling
So in many cases, according to the spelling rules that you are suggesting, -ize is incorrect depending on the word's etymology.
Personal feeling - any English rule that begins with "the correct ending for each word depends on whether the root word is Greek or French" is a terrible rule. Just pick one appropriate for your audience and stick to it. Since Oxford spelling does not do that, I wouldn't use it as my source of truth. I quite like the EU's stance: https://ec.europa.eu/info/sites/info/files/styleguide_english_dgt_en.pdf
Admin
munches on .1 firkin of popcorn
Admin
NASA gave in to peer pressure and adopted french numbers. It was clearly a mistake, given it killed the MCO.
Admin
Well, the french system got us to discover the continent which is now called the U.S.A.
Admin
quick, how many inches in 4.37 miles? i'm american, but even a dummy like me can see that it's easier to move a decimal point around (4.37 km. == 4 370 000 mm.) than to actually do unnecessary arithmetic. as for spelling, i've read that we americans standardized spellings and stuck with them after mr. webster put his book together, but any version of english could use a lot of cleanup. that said, if i put up a sign for my american business in french or spanish, i won't get fined by the government for not using the national language like i would in france, which is run by grammer nazis who are far more strict than i. a lingua franca is a good thing, but legislating the language of private transactions is just dumb.
Admin
It's a bit sad that this is the opinion people seem to have about Indians. But then, how many Indians are likely to read things like TDWTF anyway?