Going metric

Without giving the matter much thought, I had thought that until very recently that our weights and measures were sturdily Anglo-Saxon, while the French counted on their fingers & toes and did things in tens.

In the margins of checking something in a Maigret story, I find that, as ever, things are not as simple as they at first seemed.

It seems that in the olden days the French had a unit of currency called the livre, later subsumed into the franc. And a livre was made of twenty sous, and a sou (equivalent to our shilling) was made of four liards, and a liard (equivalent to our once much loved threepenny bit) was made of three deniers, equivalent to our old pennies.

The livre was also a unit of weight, later subsumed into half a kilogram, very roughly our own pound, which last also served for both money and weight. And this livre was made of two marcs and a marc was made of eight onces, equivalent to our ounce. Not to be confused with marc, the strong, working-class liquor occasionally used by Maigret. Roughly the Italian grappa, mentioned in these pages from time to time. See, for example, reference 1.

Lots of regional variations, but I think this was the general idea. Not very metric at all. With most of these words surviving in colloquialisms used by Simenon in his Maigret stories.

PS: in newspeak, a sou is five centimes; a nod to the nickel of the US.

Reference 1: https://psmv3.blogspot.com/2018/10/grappa.html.