Translating
Fahrenheit into Centigrade and _vice versa_, is one of the most painful
mental processes I can think of. I know that I cannot perform the
operation, and I cannot help trying. I remember how a certain European
monarch once lay seriously ill and my evening newspaper reported that
his temperature was 38.3 degrees C. On my way home I attempted to put
38.3 degrees C. into terms of F., and it speaks well for the
constitution of that European monarch that he should have survived the
violent fluctuations of temperature to which I subjected him. At Grand
Central Station he was literally burning up under a blazing heat of 142
degrees. At Ninety-sixth Street he was down to 74. As I walked home from
the station I was forced to admit that I was not sure whether one should
multiply by five-ninths or nine-fifths.
I would not be misunderstood. I am no enemy of the public institutions I
have criticised. Far from it; clocks, thermometers, weather-vanes, and
weighing-machines--they are but the remnants of the fine old communal
life of which our urban and Anglo-Saxon civilisation has kept only too
little.
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