I am a six-foot man. Not six-footed, of course; that would call for six legs too. But not six-feet either. For reasons that no one knows, in such phrases we leave the noun in the singular.

This usage is commonest with measures of some sort: a six-inch ruler, a two-tonne weight, a five-year delay. But it is not confined to them: you can have a two-party coalition, a five-car motorcade, a 20-man committee. There are exceptions: Europe’s Hundred Years War is habitually so spelled. But usually, as Kipling wrote of the north-west frontier, two thousand pounds of education drops to a ten-rupee jezail. Nor is the usage confined to adjectival forms. You can’t have a coalition of two party. But ask how tall I am, and my likeliest reply is “six foot”. Money pounds are always plural, but to make chutney I might use five pound of onions, though I’d add two ounces, not ounce, of raisins.

England’s sporting gentry go further still. They (now illegally) hunt foxes with 20 couple of hounds, not couples, and a good bag of pheasants in the huge shoots organized for King Edward VII a century ago was maybe 500 brace (sic, in this sense of pairs: braces are for holding trousers up). Indeed that earthy monarch may well have boasted of his several brace of mistresses.

To many non-Britons — indeed to Britain’s own young these days — the oddities are odder than this. Just what are feet and inches? Pounds and ounces? Shillings and pence? Britain gave up its shillings (20 to the pound) and pence (12 to the shilling) for a decimal currency only in 1971. Only recently has it taken to litres, and only partially at that. Milk is still usually sold in pints, beer always so. Petrol comes in litres, but its consumption still in miles per gallon. The young talk in metres and centimetres, but most adults in yards, feet and inches. And both give distances in miles.

Pounds and shillings

These switches, like earlier ones, have left curious relics in the language. When I was young, there was a saying give him an inch and he’ll take an ell. We all knew the inch (2.54 cm, 12 to the foot, 36 to the yard). But what was an ell? I’ve always thought it was a yard; only did research for this article reveal that in some dim past it meant 45 inches. Tennyson’s Light Brigade charged half a league onward. Even in his day, I doubt anyone knew how far that was, until some old salt told them that in his youth it had meant three nautical miles.

Recent changes are creating similar obscurities. What was the old song’s half a pound of tuppenny rice? What is the tuppenny damn that one doesn’t give? Can London taxis still turn on a sixpence? How does one spend a penny (which today’s kids pronounce one p, thereby, by pure chance, giving the answer)? Or cut off one’s prodigal heir without a shilling?

The two-bob bit — the two-shilling coin — is dead, the useful bit no less than the obsolete bob. Will even the pound survive the assault of the euro (whose plural, by the way, is euros, despite the Eurocrats’ insolent efforts to dictate to the English language that we must add no -s)?

The old words are dying hard. Cricket is still measured in yards, and horse-races often in furlongs, an eighth of a mile. (One indeed is still called the Two Thousand Guineas, though the guinea, worth 21 shillings, died as a coin with the 18th-century gamblers who used it, surviving only in racehorse prices, bets, auctions and doctors’ and lawyers’ bills.) We still go the extra mile, and a miss is still as good as one. Yet I suspect we oldies have only kilometres to go before we sleep — presumably, at the last, not in six feet of earth but 1.8288 metres.

I doubt we can still try to get a quart out of a pint pot, when the modern world demands its pound of flesh. If I had an ounce of commonsense I wouldn’t give a damn, tuppenny or other. But I haven’t, so I do.