Having barred London−talk from nearly all of my material this semester, I feel little remorse for involving you in an Anglo−American disparity that's recently been a nuisance in my life: the issue of the pound.
The problem first cropped up when, a couple weeks back, I lost the contents of my wallet to an unruly, typical London overcast−day gust of wind. Lamenting my misfortune, I turned to the Internet for some sympathy, hoping for some of that good old TLC, one Facebook friend to another — after all, as the post explained, "I lost twenty Pounds!"
The American in me soon realized, though, that while my British friends might understand the situation as the monetary travesty that it was, to my friends and family back home, I sounded more like a smug fat−camper on my mediocre way.
Naturally, I took the post down, but the pound business was a repeat offender. It next took form while I was visiting home last weekend, raving to my childhood friends, now loyal Blackberry owners, about my tiny little 5−Pound U.K. phone. They looked on in astonishment as I explained how thrilled I was with my pocket−sized 5−Pounder.
Of course what we were caught in was a classic slapstick dilemma in which we were having two completely different conversations using the same words; they were marveling at the backwardness of English technology while I was just explaining how inexpensive my couple−ounce chunk of plastic was.
The real root of the pound/Pound problem, though, comes down to a very simple matter. And that is that they both mean the exact same thing: "libra pondo," which is "a pound (libra) by weight (pondo)." The evidence can be found right in their symbols — lbs and £ — which, both shorthand for the same Latin words, are a lot more similar than they look.
The American pounds weight symbol, lbs, which I once assumed to be acronymous for some highly scientific term, is just a shortened version of "libra," which itself is a shortening for "libra pondo," the Roman unit of measurement that the English adopted in the Middle Ages. Their pound, however, was closer to 12 ounces, as opposed to the one we currently use, which, at some point between its journey across the Atlantic and absorption into American culture, turned into the supersized 16.
In a similar progression, although it never quite made the transatlantic trip, the terribly−difficult−to−pen symbol for Great British Pounds, £, is also just an abridged form of "libra" and, in turn, of "libra pondo" — the reason being that many hundreds of years ago the British currency was equivalent to one pound in weight of silver. To simplify writing the symbol: Despite its usual attractive font — with its curves and curls and optional flourishes — that seems, for some reason, nationally agreed upon, an uppercase L for "libra" with one or a couple of cross strokes through it (the Medieval scribal indication for shorthand) will suffice.
One mystery still left unsolved is that of why, in written form, we shorten "pounds weight" to the Latin "weight," but then read it as "pounds."
Perhaps even more disturbing, though, is the origin of pound cake, which I happened upon in the process of investigating the lbs/£ problem. I was hoping that it would be on account of its price that the pound cake is so−called, but allegedly it's because the pastry contains about a pound of each ingredient, which, especially considering our "upgrade" from 12 to 16 ounces, is just disgusting.
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Romy Oltuski is a junior majoring in English. She can be reached at Romy.Oltuski@tufts.edu.
