Colder Than Denmark
Jun. 24th, 2011 04:04 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
omorkaThere's no such thing as an arbitrary number. Almost every time a number is assigned to something by a human, at least part of that number refers to something. An ISBN tells you the book's publisher, for instance. But humans also tend to forget referents, or to change things without changing the numbering scheme, so that numbers that once made some sort of sense now appear arbitrary.
For instance, the Celsius temperature scale has two very non-arbitrary numbers - 0 is the freezing point of water, 100 is the boiling point of water. Obviously, for creatures made of 70% water whose environments are water-rich, those two values are very useful. In comparison, the Fahrenheit scale seems completely arbitrary. 100 doesn't match anything in particular; neither does 0, or 10, or any other nice number. But when the scale was founded, one number did mean something, something even more intimate than the freezing and boiling points of water, something that made the scale more human-specific than even the Celsius scale: 96 was human body temperature.
"But wait," I hear you protest on the other side of that glass screen. "Human average body temperature isn't 96°F; it's 98.6°F." (A few of you are continuing on to complain about giving the average and not the standard deviation; my heart is with you, but that's another rant to be declaimed another time.) Well, yes, but that was the measurement Mr. Fahrenheit had at the time. Why 96? Possibly because that made horse body temperature (ah, what a Terran scale this is!) 100, and 96 has lots of divisors, which made marking equal intervals on a thermometer easier. The 0 isn't completely arbitrary, either, but it's based on the freezing point of a water solution of ammonium chloride. Why that and not water? It's not entirely clear, but the great Cecil Adams pointed out that it meant that most outdoor thermometers used in Fahrenheit's home country, Denmark, would rarely if ever need negative numbers.
Fahrenheit's intent, afterwards, was that the difference between water's freezing and boiling points would be 180° - that, is half a circle. A little arbitrary, but a measurement that most humans would be familiar with, at least. This was where the trouble began; when scientists with better thermometers standardized the scale, they found that if all degrees were at equal intervals, with the zero, water-freezing, and water-boiling points at 0, 32°, and 212°, then average body temperature wasn't at 96° after all - and thus the grand, non-arbitrary human-scale point on the Fahrenheit scale was obliterated, replaced by a clumsy decimal. Our loss (and Denmark's) was Celsius's (and Sweden's) gain.
Now, I told you that story so I could tell you this one.
Men's clothing has numbers on it, and sometimes letters. Sometimes those are arbitrary - S, M, XXL, 5X. Those you just have to know, or be brave enough to try on. But often, especially with pants and non-knit shirts, those numbers actually represent a measurement - in the US, usually in inches, just like we cling to Fahrenheit's temperature system. For pants, it's usually two numbers, and they're usually the length of the waistband and the length of the inseam.
Women's clothing also has numbers and/or letters on it, but with the exceptions of bra bands and an occasional inseam length, they don't correspond to an actual measurement. In fact, often they aren't the same from manufacturer to manufacturer. Depending on whether I'm getting a top, a skirt, or a dress, and what label I'm buying, I may need anything from an 18 to a 24. I have just recently discovered, through diligent research (aka reading a book and verifying it with the pattern manufacturers' websites) that the American pattern companies are at least standardized with each other, and have been since the late '60s. This is why I'm at least consistently in the 24-26 range by measurements on their packaging. But that 24 still doesn't mean anything.
And it never did. But 16 used to.
At least according to Palmer & Alto's Fit For Real People, back in the dawn of the last century, women's clothing - that is, adult women's clothing - was sold by a size number, with that size being a measurement - the bust, in inches. If you were a 34" bust, you ordered a 34. This might cause problems if you had a particularly flat or full bosom, but at least it represented an actual non-arbitrary value. For younger women, they offered Misses' sizes from 10 or 12 up to 20, by twos - which represented the age of the young lady who would be wearing the garment. A 16 meant a dress fitted to an "average" 16-year-old girl, who might not be taller than an average 14-year-old girl but would likely be slightly fuller in the bust and hip.
Somewhere between the 20s and the 50s, adult women began wearing the Misses' sizes. And why not? A stylish flapper girl in her mid-20s in the mid-20s likely wore undergarments that de-emphasized her breasts and buttocks anyway; her figure wouldn't be that much different from a 16-year-old. (Remember that many women hit puberty later back then, too.) The Women's sizes with their at-least-one-meaningful-number were deprecated - the companies could get away with making one set of sizes instead of two - at the same time as the Misses' numbers lost their meaning and became arbitrary values, as well as gaining values above 20 for mature women who were thicker in the waist and hip.
And so 24 was always arbitrary - a 24-year-old isn't built any differently from a 22-year old, on average - but 16 once meant something, and a woman in her 20s or even 30s who wore a Misses' 16 was flaunting her youthful figure. Just like 98.6°F is a clumsy measurement, but 96°F isn't, and used to mean the same thing - and 0°F is colder than most winters in Denmark.
For instance, the Celsius temperature scale has two very non-arbitrary numbers - 0 is the freezing point of water, 100 is the boiling point of water. Obviously, for creatures made of 70% water whose environments are water-rich, those two values are very useful. In comparison, the Fahrenheit scale seems completely arbitrary. 100 doesn't match anything in particular; neither does 0, or 10, or any other nice number. But when the scale was founded, one number did mean something, something even more intimate than the freezing and boiling points of water, something that made the scale more human-specific than even the Celsius scale: 96 was human body temperature.
"But wait," I hear you protest on the other side of that glass screen. "Human average body temperature isn't 96°F; it's 98.6°F." (A few of you are continuing on to complain about giving the average and not the standard deviation; my heart is with you, but that's another rant to be declaimed another time.) Well, yes, but that was the measurement Mr. Fahrenheit had at the time. Why 96? Possibly because that made horse body temperature (ah, what a Terran scale this is!) 100, and 96 has lots of divisors, which made marking equal intervals on a thermometer easier. The 0 isn't completely arbitrary, either, but it's based on the freezing point of a water solution of ammonium chloride. Why that and not water? It's not entirely clear, but the great Cecil Adams pointed out that it meant that most outdoor thermometers used in Fahrenheit's home country, Denmark, would rarely if ever need negative numbers.
Fahrenheit's intent, afterwards, was that the difference between water's freezing and boiling points would be 180° - that, is half a circle. A little arbitrary, but a measurement that most humans would be familiar with, at least. This was where the trouble began; when scientists with better thermometers standardized the scale, they found that if all degrees were at equal intervals, with the zero, water-freezing, and water-boiling points at 0, 32°, and 212°, then average body temperature wasn't at 96° after all - and thus the grand, non-arbitrary human-scale point on the Fahrenheit scale was obliterated, replaced by a clumsy decimal. Our loss (and Denmark's) was Celsius's (and Sweden's) gain.
Now, I told you that story so I could tell you this one.
Men's clothing has numbers on it, and sometimes letters. Sometimes those are arbitrary - S, M, XXL, 5X. Those you just have to know, or be brave enough to try on. But often, especially with pants and non-knit shirts, those numbers actually represent a measurement - in the US, usually in inches, just like we cling to Fahrenheit's temperature system. For pants, it's usually two numbers, and they're usually the length of the waistband and the length of the inseam.
Women's clothing also has numbers and/or letters on it, but with the exceptions of bra bands and an occasional inseam length, they don't correspond to an actual measurement. In fact, often they aren't the same from manufacturer to manufacturer. Depending on whether I'm getting a top, a skirt, or a dress, and what label I'm buying, I may need anything from an 18 to a 24. I have just recently discovered, through diligent research (aka reading a book and verifying it with the pattern manufacturers' websites) that the American pattern companies are at least standardized with each other, and have been since the late '60s. This is why I'm at least consistently in the 24-26 range by measurements on their packaging. But that 24 still doesn't mean anything.
And it never did. But 16 used to.
At least according to Palmer & Alto's Fit For Real People, back in the dawn of the last century, women's clothing - that is, adult women's clothing - was sold by a size number, with that size being a measurement - the bust, in inches. If you were a 34" bust, you ordered a 34. This might cause problems if you had a particularly flat or full bosom, but at least it represented an actual non-arbitrary value. For younger women, they offered Misses' sizes from 10 or 12 up to 20, by twos - which represented the age of the young lady who would be wearing the garment. A 16 meant a dress fitted to an "average" 16-year-old girl, who might not be taller than an average 14-year-old girl but would likely be slightly fuller in the bust and hip.
Somewhere between the 20s and the 50s, adult women began wearing the Misses' sizes. And why not? A stylish flapper girl in her mid-20s in the mid-20s likely wore undergarments that de-emphasized her breasts and buttocks anyway; her figure wouldn't be that much different from a 16-year-old. (Remember that many women hit puberty later back then, too.) The Women's sizes with their at-least-one-meaningful-number were deprecated - the companies could get away with making one set of sizes instead of two - at the same time as the Misses' numbers lost their meaning and became arbitrary values, as well as gaining values above 20 for mature women who were thicker in the waist and hip.
And so 24 was always arbitrary - a 24-year-old isn't built any differently from a 22-year old, on average - but 16 once meant something, and a woman in her 20s or even 30s who wore a Misses' 16 was flaunting her youthful figure. Just like 98.6°F is a clumsy measurement, but 96°F isn't, and used to mean the same thing - and 0°F is colder than most winters in Denmark.
