>>> To put things even worse, the pupils in a 9th grade public school 
>>> here
>>> in Sweden does not know how many cm (centimeters) is a m (meter).

1.    It doesn't matter, as a cm is a unit from the pit of hell and 
has no place in an engineers toolbox ( notwithstanding the fact that I 
use them frequently :-) ).

2.    There is no such thing as a centimeter * in Sweden :-) - only in 
The US of A where they think that even the names of official 
international units can be respelt **  different like coz they don't 
like the way they are really spelt**.

Long ago my son spelt LASER as Lazer. I said that that was incorrect. 
He said that that's how the Americans spell it and so that's how it 
was these days (maybe not quite in those words). I disabused him of 
the notion that an acronym could be respelled (let alone 
decapitalised) to suit some US whim. He concurred. It's quite possible 
that that was the last 'argument' with him that I ever won :-). Maybe 
the only one. I didn't point out that it was (AFAIK) a US acronym in 
the first place.


        Russell


*    Real life:        metre
      USAism:        meter

Being a metre matter as it's made, no doubt, from forms which give us 
other words.
With meter we can expect meterication and its ilk.


** Anglo-pedants *** corrigenda:    respelled, spelled,


*** eg Jinx


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