So, a customer asking for a pound after 2010 may be served a 500 g portion.
I'm told they already do this in some areas of Britain.
As these names are still used infrequently on the continent, they always refer to 500 g and thus are not a pound in the British sense.
Should read
frequently
And outside of Britain, there were no standard units until metrication.
No, although many people from the English-speaking world and young people anywhere would think so. In reality, measures and scales have been tightly controlled ever since antiquity. In Athens, a seller who was caught cheating by the inspector not only lost the goods but had his scales destroyed too. Each each country (or even city) had it's own measures. If the European countries hadn't converted to the metric system, there would still be the Swedish pound (skålpund = 425g), the Norwegian pound (pund = 498g), French pound (livré = 489.5g), Russian pound (funt = 409.5g) and so on.
