It’s obvious why this measurement was used - to help group larger amount of pounds. Like why we have kilometres and metres.
Yes, I am stupid. In my rush to be the first to reply to the OP, I multiplied when I should have divided.
Oh well. A 370 James Bond would be a site to see!
Since the OP has been answered and somebody with a hat on will be along to close this thread soon, I’d just like to add that however confusing it may seem, not all European countries use metric measurements for everything. So the assumption implied by kilograms (UK) was a mistake – the British use a mixture of traditional and metric units for the things we measure.
Actually, it wouldn’t, because a kilogram is officially a unit of mass, not a unit of weight. 
But seriously, folks:
I just saw Bridget Jones’s Diary (the movie with Renee Zellweger) for the first time. In the scene where she steps onto her bathroom scale, you can clearly see that the scale is calibrated in kilograms on the inner part of the dial and stone on the outer part of the dial.
She also says she weighs “134 pounds” and makes a New Year’s Resolution to “lose 20 pounds,” and I can’t help but think that those units were probably translated from stone for the benefit of the American viewing audience.
People will generally talk about losing pounds rather than losing x stone, simply because they will tend to lose weightby small amounts.
Yep, but no British peron would say I weigh so-and-so pounds, unless they were talking to an American, I know I certainly have to do a quick mutiplication in my head to get my weight in pounds.
Certainly that is true; very few British people will state their weight solely in pounds; more likely that (if they didn’t express it in stone) they would use kilogrammes.
In one of the Deleted Scenes on the Bridget Jones’s Diary DVD, a pair of train station beggars comments on Bridget’s “enormous” thighs. (Remembering, of course, that this is Hollywood’s definition of enormous – even though Bridget is a short woman of 5’3", her 134 pounds is still within the normal healthy weight range for her. I looked it up on a body mass index calculator and everything.)
One of the two beggars says that Bridget “could stand to drop a stone or two”.
Now, while said beggar’s intent was probably to be insulting rather than to give sound dietary advice, he still referred to the weight she should lose in units of stone, not pounds.
You resurrected this thread to nitpick that?
Anyway, I was using “weigh” in the colloquial sense to mean “have a mass of at 1g.” I mean, I was using kg as an abbreviation for kilogram-weight. Hey, imperial uses pounds for both… Uh, or maybe I was using “make sense” to mean “be an expected development” not “conform correctly to dimensional analysis.” Yeah, that’s it. 
Oh never mind. And yes, I her weight was measured in stones in the book, though weight loss was in pounds iirc. (And she’s Bridget Jones! She doesn’t know the difference between mass and weight)
I needed a conversion to 'looking good’ness - I skimmed over the numbers assuming she was at least somewhat overweight, and then looked and realised she was just insecure
Cool! I didn’t know Google had a unit-conversion calculator built in. I always used the one at www.megaconverter.com instead.
There’s a really comprehensive weight/mass unit converter over at http://www.sciencemadesimple.net/weight.html , along with converters for other kinds of units, but be warned – their volume conversion tool has incorrect sizes for British pints and quarts (although it has the correct size for the British gallon).
True enough. I took her stated weight in the movie (136 lbs.), and combined it with Renee Zellweger’s height which I gott off the IMDb (5’3"), and plugged it into one of those online Body Mass Index calculators. Sure enough, she was within the normal healthy weight range, not overweight.
So a hundredweight is 112 pounds? There’s got to be some interesting story behind that one.
12 inches to a foot makes some sense (divisible by 2, 3, 4, and 6), as does 16 ounces to the pound (power of two), but 14 pounds to the stone? Is there no number that the Brits (and us 'Merkins who were crazy enough to keep the system) won’t use as a conversion factor?
We seem remarkably resistant to 10, though it’s gained a lot in poularity recently
I assumed a hundredwieght was chosen to be 8 st. But I don’t know. Most of the measurements seem to have an interesting story…
There are 20 hundredweights in a British ton, so some nice consistency with 20 shillings in a pound. One ton is then 2,240 lbs, whereas the American 2,000 lbs short ton is easier.
A google shows “hundredweight” showing up on many US web pages as a shipping weight (e.g. it was on FedEx and UPS pages), but didn’t notice an explanation. Is it 100 lbs?
Actually, as shade alludes to in the post following yours, Chronos, there are two tons – but it’s not British vs. American.
There was formerly a measurement called the “long ton” equivalent to 2,240 pounds avoirdupois, used for measuring the weight of specific commodities – coal, for one. (I learned about it as a child when my dad was working for a coal company.) This was used alongside the “short ton” of 2,000 pounds.
The hundredweight, no modifier, was, unsurprisingly, 100 pounds, or 0.05 (short) ton. But there was a (rarely used) measurement called the “long hundredweight” of 112 pounds, or 0.05 long ton.
AFAIK the long ton and the two types of hundredweight have pretty well faded from use in the last fifty years. But I’d not be surprised to find out they’re still used here and there.
(It’s interesting to note that the long ton is nearly equivalent to the metric tonne, 1 long ton being 98.4375% of a metric tonne – or 1 metric tonne being 1.015873 long tons.)
Cloves?!?!!
From IMDB:
“There are subtle differences between the same scenes in the USA and UK versions of the movie. This includes not only different takes of the scene, but sometimes different dialogue. For example, one version of the first job interview has a question about “the El Niño phenomenon”, others have a question about Microsoft. In addition, during the credits, the USA version has a home movie of Mark Darcy’s 8th birthday party with the young Bridget. The UK version has interviews with the various characters about the new relationship between Bridget and Mark.”
I guess it is quite possible that the scene you mentioned was filmed differently for the US version of the movie and hence she used measurements that Americans would be familiar with. IIRC here in Sweden we had the UK version of the movie.
tracer: No, I’d never heard of them either. Certainly not in daily use these days, but then nor are the rod, pole, perch, chain etc. Some old units still cling on for special purposes only – a cricket pitch is 22 yards long which is 1 chain, for instance, and furlongs are still used to measure the length of horse races.
Coal is still sold in hundredweights for domestic use, and a person controlling their weight might refer to an amount in either stone or pounds (“I lost half a stone this month on that Atkins thing” etc).