In a linguistically just world, the alternative to the Fahrenheit Scale is not the Celsius Scale.
We Americans measure temperature in degrees Fahrenheit. On this scale, water freezes at 32 degrees and boils at 212 degrees, and though there’s method to these seemingly arbitrary numbers, I shall bore neither you nor myself by repeating that method here. The rest of the world has moved to measuring in degrees Celsius. In this system, water freezes at o degrees and boils at 100 (although when Mr. Anders Celsius invented the scale in 1742, he designated o as the boiling point and 100 for the freezing point—more on that in a moment). The Celsius scale employs a tidy metric scheme—for example, 50 degrees is halfway between freezing and boiling, while in Fahrenheit, 50 degrees is . . . well. . . hotter than 32.
To convert a Fahrenheit measurement into Celsius (bear with me), one employs this formula: °C = (°F - 32) x (5 9), and using
your fingers and toes isn’t allowed.
“There is also no I in the phrase “The author of the book before you,” but here I am nonetheless.
So what the hell does this have to do with English? This: where Celsius effectively employs mathematical meter, it stomps all over literary meter. I’m certain Mr. Celsius was a fine gent, but his name has all the pronounceability of she sells Celsius down by the seashore. Frustrating, considering that the scale used to be called the Centigrade Scale.
Centigrade —literally, 100 degrees—is a marvelous match of form and content, a precise metric word for a precise metric measurement. But in 1948, the Conference generale des poids et mesures and the Comite international des poids et measures decided to honor Mr. Celsius by taking the word centigrade, dividing it by 2, multiplying it by shhhhhh, and destroying some exquisite linguistic and mathematical correlation.
Now, in 1744, the year of Celsius's death, a botanist using a centigrade thermometer decided to swap the meaning of o and 100 on the scale, so that rising numbers more logically denoted rising heat. If only this gentleman had been around in 1948 to overturn the regrettable naming decision of the Conference generale des poids et masures a raconter des betises, turning the new name of the scale completely upside-down to its more logical elocution, just as he had the scale itself. And he would have had the power to do it, this Mr. Carolus Linnaeus, pioneer of formal, studied, logical taxonomical nomenclature that we use today.