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THE DEVELOPMENT OF MEANING IN THE NAMES OF WEIGHTS AND MEASURES
In the various names of weights and measures there are many general-utility words which offer no difficulty in the sphere of those who use them habitually, yet which are sometimes puzzling to others, while they are interesting to the student of semantics. They form a chapter in the history of weights and measures, itself a volume in the history of the human mind.
Some terms have an obvious meaning, as ‘half’ and ‘quarter.’
These inevitably run through the usual series of measures. Even the metric system has to tolerate half-units as a concession to unscientific weakness while refusing quarters otherwise than as 25 hundredths of the unit. But quarters are firmly rooted in the human mind and resist scientific attempt to extirpate them. They are very common in the sexdecimal series, representing a fourth of one unit and four of a lower unit.
Quart and Quartern have acquired certain definite senses, the first of a quarter-gallon, the second either of a quarter-pint or of a quarter-peck. Quarter by itself is of wide application; it may mean the fourth of a pound or of a hundredweight or of a dollar, or of an acre. In its Teutonic form we have it in farthing and in firkin. France has its _quart_ as a quarter-pound, its _quartié_ in land-measure, its _quarteron_ as a quarter-hundred, though usually 26.
The context, whether in writing or in speech, usually shows the meaning of ‘quarter’ unless that meaning has been destroyed by legislation, as in the case of the Quarter of wheat where the meaning of the word could not be recognised either by the eminent scientific member of a Parliamentary Committee or by the scientific expert in measures giving evidence before him. The Quarter has remained, while the Chaldron, of which it was a fourth, was so worried by legislative interference that it disappeared as a corn-measure.
The French Setier in its different senses of a load of corn, of a bushel, of a double gallon, and of a pint, had long lost all connection with L. _sextuarius_; it had indeed got to mean a quarter in the same way that in Italy the _sestiero_, originally one of the six districts of a city, had acquired a similar sense to the French _quartier_ as a district. The French setier or sestié had so lost its original meaning as to be often written ‘septier,’ as if it were a seventh.