And then there’s the South African experience, with swinging tunes:
Not included: cringey newsreels showing white teachers explaining the new money to stereotyped Blacks.
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It’s very similar to a Transatlantic accent. Though that would be odd, since that was a distinctly American accent. It just seems to have a lot of features in common, such as the articulation of /t/ and, as you pointed out, the quality of the /ɹ/.
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Actually it was a little more complicated than that with some “rounding up” required at the cash register. Lets face it - it was bloody devaluation.
I just can’t accurately remember the formula or find it on the net. But, although 1 penny was worth 1 cent, a Shilling - being 12 pence was only worth 10 cents. Sixpence was worth 5 cents and a threepence coin only got you 2 cents.
I imagine something similar happened in Britain when they later went decimal.
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Back in the 70s or so, the USA was on track to move to a decimal measurement system (ie, metric). This new math was too hard for Ronnie Reagan, so he and his troublemakers threw it out the window. We’re still stuck with weird stuff like inches, yards, miles.
There are probably a few mileage markers on highways that show both miles and km to the destination, but not like it was back then. Too bad we missed an opportunity to modern up.
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wow I’m trying to imagine the cluster fuck that would be coding financial systems to account for the the old way.
The animated map of the world seems carefully designed to make Britain’s stance irrelevant. Imagine if they had painted the decimal world a solid color! Instead, the standouts sort of blend in-- and Baffin Island stands out against the rest of Canada.
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We didn’t have colour TV until ten years after this PSA went to air so the patterns are probably to help with monochrome broadcast.
My high school geography teacher was color blind and used to get us to do similar things when we drew maps.
wow I’m trying to imagine the cluster fuck that would be coding financial systems to account for the the old way.
As somebody up the page said, early mainframes sometimes had support for this type of number representation. It does make sense, CPUs these days support a number of numeric formats.
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We still have an occasional km sign in VT. They used to be common but the Feds took care of telling us to remove them. Because fuck tourists coming down from Canada, apparently.
Australian here, come across many architectural plans in metric to be used in a 3D visualisation - not an architect and not a problem to deal with. Imperial on the other hand is an absolute nightmare when double checking reference points, multiplying feet and fractions of inches 
Strangely, born 3 years before decimalisation, imperial still has currency with regard to body height (6ft+ = tall) and inches still seem to reign supreme re male appendage length…
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You’d think centimeters would be preferred since it’s a larger number - especially if you use millimeters.
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Yes, this is my understanding. A supposedly neutral accent that was actually taught/ learned by broadcasters and actors and acquired by the ‘upper class’ as ‘proper’.
The darker colonial British heritage of this accent ties into the fact that we had a non-Asian ‘White Australia’ migration policy in existence into the 1960’s to exclude the Chinese which had settled during the gold mining era and were seen to be a challenge to our ‘true’ British history.
Also, this colonial accent would have been an absolute affront to the longest continuous living cultures on earth.
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God only knows what is going on for anyone that reaches for the ruler!
I see that Patrick Stewart managed a cameo appearance in the short. And one Sylvester McCoy-era Doctor Who episode did a bit with Ace trying to understand the old coinage system while back in the past.
They used to do the same thing in Canada. If you wanted to be a broadcaster you went to train in the UK on the BBC and came back to the CBC speaking “proper” English.
That’s also a clever call-back to the very first episode of Doctor Who, where the first sign of time travel in the story is the doctor’s assistant not understanding the £/d system and thinking that the UK was already decimalised.
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It would seem to be that the Australian system is not decimal but centimal because it has two units 100 of which equal the other 100 cents = 1 dollar). The USA does have a decimal system because it has five units each of which equals 10 times the lower unit although only two units are in common use. (10 mills = 1 cent, 10 cents = 1 dime, 10 dimes = one dollar, and 10 dollars = 1 eagle).
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Except no American (sorry, USAean) uses dime unless talking about coins. If I had $1.23, I would NEVER say “one dollar, 2 dimes, 3 cents” unless I was talking about the exact change in my pocket.
Oh, you have a $10 coin? I didn’t know that. In OZ, our government’s wisdom was that, as there was no functional value in 1 and two cent coins they would eliminate them. The five and ten cent coins are the next scheduled to disappear. We have long had polymer banknotes. But the object (lamentably) is to become a “cashless society” - ostensibly to ensure that 100% of tax is collected. And with the vast majority of purchases now being made electronically and via bankcards, cash is becoming a very scarce commodity. I frequently carry none. And in those moments that I do have to pay for something in cash I am compelled to go to an ATM or to the supermarket where I can get “cash out” . I am not sure if plastic card payment is quite as universal yet in the US?
Presumably some “shared value” commodity will arise that will enable the devious to subvert the system. Don’t say bitcoin - I don’t trust that. I would rather pay in 2-minute noodles.
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I was 6 when my dad was stationed to a U.S. air base in England in Dec. 1969. I had barely learned the old money system when they made the switch to decimal in 1971. I remember a silly primer on telly with puppets explaining the new money: “What’s a ‘Daisy Bell’ system?” “Not ‘Daisy Bell’ – DECIMAL.” By the time I returned to Britain in my college years on a work-exchange, kids just a year or two younger than I had no idea how the old money worked. My American travel buddy was confused by the still-used one- and two-shilling pieces that were pressed into service as 5 and 10 pence pieces (“What’s a ‘shilling’ worth?”). I was surprised by the pound coin, the addition of the 20-pence piece, and the loss of the tiny half-penny piece by 1985 (ah, inflation). Of course, things have changed yet again since then.
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They’ve changed four times since then.
- Changing those shillings and florins for much smaller 5 and 10p coins
- Reducing the size of the 50p
- Introducing a Canada-style bimetallic £2 coin
- Changing the pound coin design to a multi- sided bimetallic
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