This should really surprise regular readers. We are having company!

One of the things I like to do when company’s coming is to slightly modify the crappy old book selection in the guest room’s colorful library. (Many books were chosen because of the color of the cover or spine– who can resist a book with orange on the cover or spine?) For this particular guest, I’ve chosen the crappy old book, A Study of Rural Society Third Edition by J.H. Kolb (College of Agriculture, University of Wisconsin) and Edmund de S. Brunner (Teachers College, Columbia University), edited by William F. Ogburn (The University of Chicago) published by Houghton Mifflin Company in 1946.

I was perusing Chapter 5, Psychological Characteristics, which begins:

Because of the popular belief, among city people at least, that rural people are in some way inferior to their city cousins, it might not be impertinent to inquire at this point into the matter of rural and urban intelligence and characteristics, and try to analyze first, the scientific data now existing with regard to the question, and secondly, certain matters of common observation.

Let me be the first to tell you that these professors/authors are going to caution you smarty-pants city mice to not rush to any rash conclusions. After all, these country bumpkin rural folks might confuse the theatre (which they pronounce “THEE-A-ter) with a picture show (!), but they can tell you how many pecks are in a bushel!

I’ve looked through this crappy old book on more than one occasion and I can tell you that, caution aside, the tone does not please me. I had not noticed this table, under the chapter sub-head, Differences in Schooling, before.

Where is that editor from The University of Chicago when you need him?

Let’s do some country mouse math!

253 children in one-room schools

0.10% = 0.10/100 = 0.0010

0.0010 X 253 = 1/4 of a student. 

Not 1/4 of the students. A student. (Wouldn’t you like to read that methods section?)

Math is hard no matter where you go to school. And fractions are even harder!

STAY IN SKOOL! DONT“ BE A DROPOUT! AND FER GAWDS SAKE’S LERN YOU SOME MATH or at least a bit or arithmetic. 

Seriously. Books– new & old– are full of typographical errors. But for gawd sakes’! This was the third edition. Wouldn’t you have thought someone– any one– would have caught this?

~~
For the record (from the infallible source, Wikipedia):

A bushel is an imperial and U.S. customary unit of dry volume, equivalent in each of these systems to 4 pecks or 8 gallons. It is used for volumes of dry commodities (not liquids), most often in agriculture. It is abbreviated as bsh. or bu. In modern usage, the dry volume is usually only nominal, with bushels referring to standard weights instead.

Pecks & Pints below. 

A peck is an imperial and United States customary unit of dry volume, equivalent to 2 gallons or 8 dry quarts or 16 dry pints. Two pecks make a kenning (obsolete), and four pecks make a bushel.

The pint (abbreviated as “pt” or “p”) is a unit of volume or capacity that was once used across much of Europe with values varying between countries from less than half a litre to over one litre. Within continental Europe, the pint was replaced with the metric system during the nineteenth century. However, in the United States, the United Kingdom, and various other Commonwealth countries, the unit has continued to be in use. There is also limited use of the term in parts of France, Quebec (“une pinte”) and Central Europe, notably some areas in Germany and Switzerland.

The imperial pint (568 mL) is used in the United Kingdom and Ireland and to some extent in other Commonwealth nations. There are two customary pints used in the United States: a liquid pint (473 mL) and a less-common dry pint (551 mL). This difference dates back to the British Weights and Measures Act of 1824, which standardised the various pints in use at the time to a single imperial pint throughout the British Empire. The US pints were unaffected by this and can be traced back to pre-1824 English pints. Each of these pints is defined as one eighth of the respective gallon but because of differing gallon definitions, the imperial pint is approximately 20% larger than the US liquid pint. However, whereas the imperial pint is divided into 20 imperial fluid ounces, there are 16 US fluid ounces to the US liquid pint making the imperial fluid ounce slightly smaller than the US fluid ounce.

Got that?