I can see for kilometres and kilometres
Something that comes up regularly in translations is the use of miles vs. kilometres. Of course, if it’s a technical translation the point is moot – ks serve their scientific purpose. But in literary translations I still can’t bring myself to use kilometres, even if metric has become the near global standard. Phrases like “She walked for kilometres before reaching…” “His dreams/the view stretched out for kilometres” turn to marbles in the mouth.
Even though we switched from the imperial to the metric system when I was in grade 5 or 6, kilometres hold no poetry for me, no power to evoke lonely distances, the landscape and time of journeys. Steely and prim, the only image they call up is graduations on a ruler.
And miles around the wonder grew…
Centimetres are not quite so problematic (although I can still only think in inches) but what will become of the lovely to inch, for example? Will we have to start centimetering our way along the razor’s edge?
I suppose it’s inevitable that, at some point down the road, miles will disappear entirely from our vocabulary, become a quaint archaic term like cubits and stadions and zerets, but I for one will resist until the very last parasang.
And kilometres to go before I sleep.
Oh, gah, suffer the lovely cadence.
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- “My car gets forty rods to the hogshead, and that’s the way I likes it!”
Miles will disappear from the language only when the terrorists have won.
— Phineas Jan 31, 6:31pm # - Fuckin eh! That’s what I meant to say. Thank you, Phineas.
— gail Jan 31, 7:10pm # - ‘Der Tisch, an dem ich dies schreibe, ist 76,5 cm hoch, seine Platte 69,5 mal 111 cm gross.’ -Heinrich Böll
it’s that comma I hate… funny though one of the most useful weights when buying produce in France is ‘une livre’.. ie. half a kilo or a pound.. perhaps poucing?
— Julian Jan 31, 9:46pm # - I’d be a lot more comfortable portaging my canoe on my head a fraction of a kilometre, instead of dozens or hundreds of rods.
I think we should drag the U.S. National Park Service cartographers kicking and screaming into the 19th century whether they like it or not!
Phineas, I think the correct term is “hectarerists”.
— Malboeuf Jan 31, 9:54pm # - Hmmm… I don’t think “mile” will necessarily slip away. We still use “threshold” to mean both a literal piece of wood on the floor at the doorway and a portal to a new time or place, even though damned few of us still spread thresh on our packed dirt floors.
And as long as there are FM rock stations playing The Who (I Can See for Miles…) then the mile will live on in our psyche and our vocabulary.
Fear not!
— Jeff Feb 1, 4:21am # - Ooops…
Didn’t notice that you already referenced The Who. Right thar in yer danged title.
— Jeff Feb 1, 4:22am # - When I die, I’m gonna make sure I’m buried six feet under, not 1.82 metres under!
— Brian Feb 1, 7:06am # - Even here in the U.S. we use centemeters, though we certainly have no feeling for what a centemeter is. So it just means something really small and is only used in contexts when it sounds better. “Just a centemeter, and he’d have made it to the endzone.” Perhaps miles will work like that. I.e., lose all specificiity but still come up in poetic ways.
— daniel silliman Feb 1, 9:33am # - I’m fascinated by the almost universal resistance, and I include myself, to learning any new measuring system. I have to convince designers to learn and use points and picas instead of inches, and there’s just an innate resistance, even though inches are far too coarse for measuring type, and only end up showing impossible fractions for everything.
But miles is so much more poetically sound than kilometers. I think it just has to evolve from a measurement to a word meaning, ‘lots of distance.’ And then whenever we need to actually measure or be precise, we can use the scientific unit of kilometers. Right brain/left brain sort of thing.
— wizmo Feb 1, 5:23pm # - I think the resistance comes from the fact that learning a measurement system involves a very intricate set of associations that build up during a lifetime.
You’ll have a whole set of references catalogued of what measures an inch, a foot, etc. (when I was little, when trying to visualise long measurements, I’d divide them up into 6-foot increments, and imagine how many of my dads, lined up head to toe, that would be). We become capable of guessing weights and the surrounding temperature pretty accurately…
So it can be very discombobulating to have to incorporate a whole new set of references, and train our minds/bodies all over again.
— gail Feb 1, 5:51pm # - Is a mile not derived from a thousand paces. A metre could be a pace for someone with long legs.
— bobby Feb 1, 6:47pm # - I think the whole problem is that kilometres has just too many damn syllables – maybe the concept would catch on if we called them ‘klicks’ as I have heard them referred to here in Toronto
— Jerry Feb 2, 12:43am # - I feel it incumbent on me to abstain from this discussion as my foot is in fact measurable as that, just so – and this creates an innate bias, and an allegiance missing in others not so favored. When not swollen or pinched.
— rollo Feb 2, 3:18am # - I’m an Aussie. We like to shorten things. I say k’s (kaes/kays). As if we’d say kilometres all the time!
— cass Feb 2, 4:37am # - Zerets?
— language hat Feb 2, 3:15pm # - Zerets are an ancient Hebrew unit of measurement, corresponding to the distance between the tip of the thumb and the tip of the little finger when the hand is fully extended.
I think they used Herschel’s hand as the benchmark. He was a very average guy.
— gail Feb 2, 6:57pm # - > Hmmm… I don’t think “mile” will necessarily slip away. We still use “threshold” to mean both a literal piece of wood on the floor at the doorway and a portal to a new time or place, even though damned few of us still spread thresh on our packed dirt floors.
Ahem…
“Threshold: O.E. þrescold, þærscwold, þerxold ‘doorsill, point of entering,’ first element related to O.E. þrescan (see thresh), with its original sense of ‘tread, trample.’ Second element of unknown origin and much transformed in all the Gmc. languages; in Eng. it probably has been altered to conform to hold, but the oft-repeated story that the threshold was a barrier placed at the doorway to hold the chaff flooring in the room is mere folk etymology. Cognates include O.N. þreskjoldr, Swed. tröskel, O.H.G. driscufli, Ger. dial. drischaufel.”
But back to the topic at hand:
“Mile: O.E. mil, from W.Gmc. *milja, from L. mila ‘thousands,’ pl. of mille ‘a thousand’ (neuter plural was mistaken in Gmc. as fem. sing.). Ancient Roman mile was 1,000 double paces (one step with each foot), for about 4,860 feet, but there were many local variants and a modern statute mile is about 400 feet longer. In Germany, Holland, and Scandinavia in the Middle Ages, the L. word was applied arbitrarily to the ancient Gmc. rasta, a measure of from 3.25 to 6 English miles. Mile-a-minute (adj.) is attested from 1957; milestone is from 1746.”
— Dan Feb 3, 12:51am # - Despite every attempt to bring distance measurement in line with our decimal currency and weights (still ongoing, by the way, with dual measurements on a lot of food items), and despite teaching our children about centimetres, metres and kilometres, here in the UK miles are as strong as ever. All our road signs use miles and our speedometers measure miles per hour, with kilometres relegated to tiny figures on the outside of the dial that no-one pays any attention to. I despair of the UK’s wariness towards Europe, but this is one example I’m happy with.
— LintHuman Feb 3, 4:35pm # - In Swedish, we have the both poetic and practical word mil which is ten kilometres. This measure was created in 1889 when Sweden and Norway adopted the metric system. (It is a rough equivalent of the old Swedish mile which was the same – at least in 1665 – as 36 000 feet, 10688,54 m.)
Mil is not used on roadsigns, that would be confusing, but it is often used in conversation and in certain expressions. A 50 km skirace is commonly called a femmil, a five-mil.
As far as I know, mil is only used in Sweden and Norway and by the Swedish-speaking minority in Finland. It’s pronounced like the English word “meal” .
— Jorun Feb 3, 5:02pm # - Kilos, while not as soft as miles, is a better replacement for miles than kilometres.
— Keith Feb 4, 6:57pm # - along the same lines (i feel like i should make a pun here), i have problems with the non-romanticism of the 24-hour-clock.
“i’ll see you at twenty-hundred-hours” just doesn’t thrill before that first date, quite the way “”i’ll pick you up at eight” does…
and (whether or not it was true), Marilyn having a “perfect 94-58.4-91.4” bod doesn’t exactly lend itself to immediate appreciation.
— nightingaleshiraz Feb 6, 11:14am #
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