Back in the spring I wrote about picking stone to prepare the farmer’s fields for plowing, and the fact that we think of all these “stone” as a single mass and not individual “stones” reminded me of one of my favorite Britishisms, heard in a movie recently: “He’s a large fellow. Must weigh 20 stone.” With 14 pounds to a stone, he would tip the scales at 280 avoirdupois pounds. I love “stone” – it’s so quaint, so “jolly olde England.” It brings up several questions: Why do two different systems of weight exist? Why such a random number as 14? And I slipped that word “avoirdupois” in there. What’s that all about? Most people can’t even say it.
Let’s take the last question first: “avoirdupois.” This is a delicious word from the French. It looks like it means “to have weight,” but “avoir” was also a noun in the Middle Ages, so it’s better translated as “goods of weight.” Its meaning evolved into our everyday, or “customary,” system of 16 ounces to a pound, as opposed to the UK’s imperial system, which includes stone.
The Middle Ages put old French words through the wringer, and when they were
hung out to dry, their pronunciations had changed. The dictionaries tell us that what we
ended up with for “avoirdupois” should be pronounced /AV er duh poyz/ – which is
surprising and made me wonder if that’s still accurate. So about 40 years ago, as I was
writing a pronunciation guide to the hard words in Shakespeare, I decided to go to the
experts. Every state has an office that oversees weights and measures, to make sure
butchers, for example, aren’t shortchanging their customers by falsifying the scales. I
phoned 10 keepers of weights and measures around the country and asked them how
to pronounce this bizarre-looking word, figuring they would use it if anyone did, and the
dictionary pronunciation would be passed down from generation to generation. It was
not. Only one of them gave the dictionary pronunciation. The others were all over the
place – guesswork based on an imperfect knowledge of French. Just now I repeated
that experiment with New Hampshire’s Director of Weights and Measures, who told me
it was /av-uh-doo PWAH/.
Having 16 ounces to a pound and 2,000 pounds to a ton seems as random as 14 pounds
to a stone, but apparently it’s all about division: half of 16 is 8, half of 8 is 4, half of 4 is
2, so 16 makes it easy to halve when you’re trading in goods sold in weights under a few
pounds. Stone, on the other hand, was for bigger bulk commodities like livestock or
bales of wool to Italy. When the cargoes got big, merchants could deal in “hundredweight” (8 stone) and the “long ton” (20 hundredweight = 160 stone). Originally, the stone was a handy weight because stones are everywhere to put on a scale, but the downside, as any child can tell, is that random, same-sized stones won’t necessarily weigh the same. In 1350, the stone was standardized at 14 pounds, but only for certain items. For trade in glass, spices, and lead, one stone equaled 5, 8 and 12 pounds, respectively. The Europeans should go down on their knees and say a prayer of thanks every night at having been conquered by Napoleon 200 years ago, who very sensibly forced the metric system down their throats, based on 10. The UK, unwilling to admit Napoleon was right about anything, reluctantly followed suit decades later, giving up on the imperial system except for body weight.
Maybe someday, someone will pry us away from our old measurements, some leader with enough self-assurance, chutzpah, and indifference to the protests of entrenched stakeholders to bulldoze past their objections and bring the United States into conformity with the rest of the world. Actually, we wouldn’t have to wait long, would we – that personality is presently occupying the Oval Office and could make it happen tomorrow, except that the battle cry is “America first and devil take the rest of the world!” He’d be more likely to take the reverse course and demand all our scientists give up the metric system and conduct their experiments in ounces and inches.
Dale Coye is a member of the American Dialect Society. He has taught English and the humanities at several universities and worked in area theaters as a dialect coach and director. He grew up on a dairy farm in central New York and now lives in Wilton.