My generation knows plenty, despite being born after the death of Elvis. We know, for instance, that in 1972 a crack commando unit was sent to prison for a crime they didn’t commit, and that these men promptly escaped to the Los Angeles underground, where they now survive as soldiers of fortune. We know that if you have a problem, and if you can find them, maybe you can hire … the A-Team.
Suckled on lip-synching, we are karaoke savants. We know that Kylie Minogue (before her orthodontic renaissance) once wondered why she was so lucky and that Belinda Carlisle wanted a light left on for her. Like singers of ancient lays, we chant in unison the dialogue of Dirty Dancing. Ferris Bueller is our spiritual mentor, and Thomas Magnum lives in the basement of our subconscious, surrounded by rubber chickens.
But venture back into the primeval mists of the mid-1970s, plunge into the Neolithic sludge of the 1960s and the Precambrian swamps of the 1950s, and we become less certain of things. And nothing is more confounding to us than the notion that once, impossibly long ago, people used something other than the decimal system.
It seems that before decimalisation South Africa’s currency used to work as follows: there were 17 pence to a farthing, and fourteen and a half farthings (or twelve, depending on the angle of the sun) to a florin. A florin was worth nine million pounds, which was equivalent to six and a third cowry shells or three British protectorates, not including Bechuanaland. Cash registers looked like church organs.
With the arrival of the decimal comma accountancy became a profession instead of a vocation, and tickies stopped being worth one-seven-millionth of a cowry shell and started lurking in Christmas pudding, grinding molars to dust. And the apparatchiks of the new system rooted out every reference to the old measurements with a zeal that would have been Inquisitorial had it not been so thoroughly modern.
Not even the Bible was spared: after decimalisation Genesis (or, in the Decimal Gospel, Book 1.0, module 6.160000) revealed how The Great Decimilator instructed his servant Noah to make ”the length of the ark 135m, its breadth 22,5m, and its height 13,5m … For behold I will bring a flood of waters upon the earth, to kill 100,0001% (better safe than sorry) of all flesh in which is the breath of life from under heaven…”
Even today the long shadow of that accursed comma lies across the landscape. Last week a piece in this newspaper about Pakistani fast bowler Shoaib Akhtar ended up commatose after a cardinal in the Inquisition of Editorial Correctitude painstakingly changed every reference to miles per hour to kilometres per hour. Poor Shoaib ended up robbed, having to settle for an anaemic 160kph instead of the Holy Grail of 100mph.
But it is reassuring that even in a devoutly decimal country such as ours, sport refuses to toe the decimal line. England are still likely to win the Rugby World Cup by a country mile rather than a pastoral 1,6093km-span.
Likewise Shaun Pollock would seem an entirely less formidable customer should he exchange his line six inches outside off stump for one 15,24cm away (although it would be nice to see him regain the 0,9144m of pace he’s lost over the years). And it’s no wonder the West Indies can’t produce great fast bowlers any more: they’re all 2,01m tall these days, not a six-foot-eight monster among the lot of them.
The fact that the Proclaimers were willing to walk 500 miles (and then 500 more) pales into insignificance when one remembers that Roger Bannister galloped the length of one in under four minutes. But Sir Roger’s breathless dash and its reeling finish is robbed of all its pioneering greatness by those who wish us to remember that he took 3,975 minutes to run 1,6km.
Boxing promoters might get excited about junior featherweight boxers tipping the scales at 42,6384kg, but they’re still 94-pound-weaklings to the rest of us. That is until they turn into 300-pound behemoths and decide to sit on everyone who called them Stringbean, at which point the difference between 136,08kg and 136,09kg is useful only to judge the exact length of time one will spend in traction.
All of which is a roundabout way of saying: you stick in a comma, you lose the point.