(translation: "How much will it cost to fill my Honda with grated cheese?")
(And ten net.points to the first person who calls me at (408)441-3141
leaving me voice-mail, saying "Ich bin ein Berliner" with an Arkansas
accent!)
> > cwt is in fact the abbreviation for hundredweight (c for centi-). 112
> I kind of thought maybe the C was from the Roman numeral for 100; but
> maybe centi- is why C was chosen to begin with; but then that doesn't
> seem to go along with the other letters used by the Romans for numbers;
> but then again, maybe the Romans were as weird about such things as the
> British were.
Centum (accusative, can't remember the full declension) is the Latin for
hundred, as in the great love poem by Catullus:
Da mihi basia multa, deinde alia centum.
("Give me many kisses, then another hundred"--trans. SFisher)
So yes, the C in Roman numerals is an abbreviation for hundred.
Sorry, as Mister Dead Language Person, I should have indicated that.
And yes, many of the Roman numerals are in fact abbreviations for the
words, at least the higher numbers are -- the lower digits are adapted
from hash marks. M comes from the Latin word for thousand; rats, I've
forgotten what D stands for; I'm faintly picking up, like psychic vibrations
from the ghost of Cicero, the memory that D stands for "decem-<something>,"
where <something> is the Latin word for 50, which starts with L (no, not
quinqueginta, but a colloquial form like "quatrevingt" for 80 in French).
O di immortales!
The derivation of the numerals I, II, and III are all obvious; IV is I
less than V, and V stands for the thumb and little finger extended wide,
meaning five fingers. X for ten is two Vs, one atop the other, and of
course positional parsing of Roman numerals is left as an exercise to
the student (who among us has not written a program that reads Roman
numerals and gives Arabic digits, or vice versa?)
Britons from about 50 B.C. onwards were considered citizens of Rome, by
the way, and maintained many Roman traditions, laws and policies well past
the collapse of the Empire in the southwest in 453 A.D. when Odoacer sacked
the Eternal City itself. Britain's fertile valleys and fields supplied, for
a period of several hundred years, almost a third of the wheat used by the
Empire as a whole. When the actual historic character believed to be King
Arthur was attempting to unify Britain, he was doing so under the banner of
Roman law and culture, and when in the late fifth century he was unable
to stem the tide of invaders from central Germany, he was victim of the
same forces that were destroying Rome herself far to the south.
And in a fascinating study of the interconnectedness of technology,
history, and politics, consider this: In about 200-300 AD, a tribe in
central Asia developed a new invention: just a hank of rope with a loop
at each end, hooked to the saddles of their horses. This invention gave
them so much more control while riding that they were able to defeat and
conquer peoples from the Urals to the Yangzi; the great upheaval that
this invention caused toppled not only Rome, as Asians moved west and
central Europeans moved past the Rhine into Roman Gaul, but also the
(ummm...) T'ang dynasty in China, around 600 AD. Later on, and getting
back to Britain, the stirrup played a crucial role in the defeat of King
Harold Godwinson, in 1066, at Hastings, when the Normans -- Scandinavian
invaders given lands in the north of France in return for ceasing to
sail up the Seine to sack Paris -- were able to remain mounted in their
charges against Harold's troops (who were already tired from a previous
battle against Harald Hardraada, King of Norway), while Harold's troops,
who had no stirrups, had to dismount after they arrived at the battlefield.
Give me a little longer and I'll work out why this relates to B(P)L's
inability to succeed in the world market...
It is my considered opinion that the Roman system of numerals was responsible
in large part for the failure of the Empire. Imagine the complexity of
doing a tax return in Roman numerals. Now couple this with a language in
which not only do you have to conjugate verbs based on how many people and
of what kind (I, you, we, he, she, or they) are using the verb form, but
you have to decline nouns (of the people, by the people, for the people would
be three different words in Latin). I always picture Silius Sodus meeting
Nautius Maximus on his way to being crucified for failing to keep Caesar's
wife above reproach, whereupon Nautius says "Ave atque vale!" And by the
time Silius figures out what that means, the Visigoths have sacked Tarentum.
> > isn't one. The RAC horsepower calculation was purely based on bore size
> > times cylinders
> Well, as long as we've strayed this far afield..
>
> Perhaps the above explains why the power part of the designation used
> for older British cars (such as in 16/80) seems to bear so little
> relation to the actual power.
Bingo again. To tie it all together, let's take a look at the rarest
production M.G. ever built, the 18/80 Mk. III, aka the "Tigress:"
18 -- the R.A.C. (um, Royal Auto Club) horsepower rating for the engine,
which as I say was based on the engine's cylinder bore times its
number of cylinders, which as you suggest has nothing to do with
its actual output (or rather, fairly little; yes, a larger cylinder
bore improves breathing, a shorter stroke gives higher RPM, while
a longer stroke improves the torque effectiveness of the cranks
throws on each power pulse)
80 -- an approximation meant to imply the car's potential performance.
I have not yet ascertained whether this meant MPH or BHP (where
brake horse power has been previously defined as the engine's
measured output on a brake, or dynamometer)
Mk. III -- a trio of hash marks indicating that this is the third model
in the 18/80 designation (and not that the car was divided into
three parts), using of course Roman Numerals
To make matters even more interesting, it was common even among comparatively
inexpensive cars such as M.G.s, before the War, to produce engine-chassis
combinations which would receive custom coachwork. Tickford, for example,
made some lovely Airline Coupe' bodies for Midgets, as well as really well
finished folding hoods and sleek bodies for the larger sports cars like
the Magnette. So it's theoretically possible to find a car sporting a
designation such as an M.G. 18/100 Raworth, where the 18 is the RAC rating,
the 100 is the performance rating (which as near as I can tell means more
or less "horsepower measured at the brochure"), with coachwork by Raworth.
So I mentioned earlier that the Tigress was the rarest production M.G.
built. The record-breakers of course were rarer (one each, for the most
part), and some of the racing models (the Q-type and R-type, for instance)
were produced in one-off or few-off versions. For your next assignment,
who (other than Roger) knows how many 18/80 Mk. III models were built by
the factory? Email me and I'll announce the winner in tomorrow's mail.
--Scott "That gives me time to look it up myself tonight as well" Fisher
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