Discorde said:
"The French insist on speaking French, when the lingua franca for aviation, commerce, technology and communication is American (English). But the Americans persist in using feet, pounds, inches of mercury, degrees Fahrenheit and so on when most of the rest of the world is metric. Remember that 767 that ran out of fuel after the uplift figure had been incorrectly loaded in pounds rather than kilos (the totaliser was u/s as I recall)."
The people of Gimli, Manitoba, remember it well.
The French in Canada use avoirdupois too, but our laws also allow for ancient French measurements pre-metric in land transactions. They all speak acceptable English to American visitors, but not to us English.
I think it is totally a mindset issue. Funny how the Norwegians, Dutch, Danish, etc speak English, maybe they learned it when the English and Americans were there stopping them from having to learn German! Funny how the French didn't learn the same lesson.