>One week after graduating from engineering college all electronic and physics terms that were from the United States were changed to European terms. I was already "obsolete" and only 7 days after graduation! No more "cycles per second". Now it is "Hertz per second". "That Hertz"!

It should not be "Hertz per second", just "Hertz". AFAIK, the definition of Hertz as an unit is "number of cycles in a second".
>
>What is one �Hertz�? Why it is one Cycle - An alternation from positive to negative through zero over a given period.

And that period is one second, in SI units.

But you're right - what you learn early on largely shapes your opinions later. The other day I was buying tobacco, in a Native American's shop, and another customer asked me
- how much is there in one bag?
- Two hundred grams.
- How many cigarettes is that?
- Well a regular cigarette is one gram, so that's two hundred cigarettes.
- Wow, never saw someone who can do metric so fast.

:)