The US going 100% metric - do we all have to die? Plus: weird measurements around the world!

In My Humble Opinion
1

The Metric System:

Are young Americans more comfortable with metric measures than earlier generations? While metric is common in food products, we’re still imperial in most of the ways that actual matter in our day to day lives, at least it seems so to me.

Then again, many things show both units of measurement, so do younger people think in metric more than I and my peers do? Are they being trained to think in the metric system now?

Because it does seem, now that I think about it, that it is almost like a different language, at least it operates that way in the mind, needing to “translate” units of measurement that are in the less familiar form. I certainly don’t have any kind of instant mental image or understanding of most metric units, and even the ones I know best I still mentally convert automatically (1 kg = 2.2 lb, 1km = 1.6 mile, 1oz = 28 grams - that last is a remnant of my cocaine days) in my head to the imperial system, because thats the system that I “know in my bones”, so to speak.

Then there’s all the cookbooks that have been written over the past hundred years that use the old system… if we go 100% metric, to the point that we can’t even purchase measuring tools that include imperial options, what happens then? How about cars, speedometers, road signs?

How long would it really take for a complete shift? One where all traces of the old system have been removed? Is one actually planned, or is the US going to go on like this for a couple hundred more years?

***British Stones
***And to our UK brethren: WTF is up with that whole “stone” thing? Where the hell did that come from? I just Wiki’d it and still… how completely strange and useless. 14 pounds? But if it’s beef, it’s 8? How does anyone find this a useful number to work with? Do your body scales actually measure in “stones”, or do you see the pounds and mentally convert them to stones in your head? Isn’t that a lot of extra work for no apparent benefit? (although saying I’m 17 stone certainly SOUNDS smaller than my pound weight… if my brain is asleep.)

***The French are Just Flat Out Nuts
***And while I’m ragging on the weirdness of measure and counting in other countries, here’s a shout out and a “What the hell are you thinking??” to the French: PLEASE explain to me the thinking that led to the decision to forego having actual words to represent the numbers 70, 80 and 90? For those who don’t know: after the number 69, which is simply 69, (soixante-neuf), they just gave up on the idea of coming up with new words to identify the new numbers. 70 isn’t “septante” or “septe”, no, it’s “soixante(60)-dix(10)” and while this thoroughly bizarre logic might lead to the conclusion that 71 would be 60-10-1 (soixante-dix-un), it’s not. It’s 60-and-11 (soixante et onze). Then 60-and12, 60-and-13, etc.

Then you get to 80. No, it’s not 60-and-20, although that would seem to follow the non-logic that’s been established. It’s actually quatre-vingts, which is “four twentys”. Yeah, I’m not kidding. 81 is quatre-vingt-un “four-twenty-one” and so forth all the way through the 90’s to “cent” which is a hundred.

It was when I learned this that I knew that learning French was not going to happen for me.

But I still want to know what the hell.

2

They still use some of the old Thai land measurements here. Wah, rai and ngan are very common.

One wah is 4 square meters.
One ngan is 400 square meters (or 100 wah).
One acre is about 2-1/2 rai; a hectare is 6-1/4 rai.

3

I’m “bilingual”, having grown up in the US and UK in the 1970s and 80s, and having lived through the conversion in the UK.

I think as humans we tend to “feel” measurements - if I tell you something is a mile away, you just feel how long that is. I eventually learned how to “feel” a kilometre too*. (And a kilo, litre, etc. Also temperature - I speak F as well as C for weather reports.)

Stone is archaic as hell but it’s ubiquitous - for human weight only. (Didn’t even know about beef stone. I doubt it’s used these days as weights and measures are all in metric.) Our bathroom scales are in stone and lbs, usually with kilos too. I understand human weight in kilos, but only if it’s within familiar limits - I couldn’t tell you how many kilos a 40 stone man is, but I know how heavy a 70 kilo man is.

Finally, I have to tell you that in my opinion the US excuses not to adopt metric are whiney. Conforming to what everyone else in the world uses is a good thing, yanks, not a bad one. If a rubbish country like the UK can (mostly) do it, then you can (mostly) do it too - you’re not that lame.

*Though of course in the UK we still use miles and MPH on the roads.

4

I lived through the conversion in Australia (in the 1970s too) and survived.

5

One of the more amusing things I read in a travel guide to Greenland (and just reading the guide was an adventure, honestly) was a short guide to West Greenlandic language. Apparently the West Greenlanders have no numbers in their language any higher than 12: after 12 is “many”.

6

I can mentally do weights, and distance [though I am sort of hazy on hectares] but I have trouble with temperature. I know that 0=freezing and 100=boiling, so that is 32 and 212 … but I can’t convert without google …

7

A very rough estimate that I always use is take the Celsius, add 15, double it, and there’s Fahrenheit.

8

If you think French numbering is strange you should try Danish. One to nineteen is straightforward, but then it begins. Like in German it’s one and twenty, two and twenty and so on until you reach nine and forty when it really gets fun. Instead of fifty to ninety it’s half(-before)-three (i.e. two and a half) times [twenty], three times [twenty] and so forth until you reach half(-before)-five times [twenty] (aka ninety) (I put twenty within brackets as this part of the number is omitted as is times. The word used, sinds, has been abbreviated to just s).

In Norwegian you can say either twenty-one (new way) or one-and-twenty (old way). There was a reform sometime in the fifties to change but it never caught on.

And while we’re on the subject of strange measurements the imperial pint, is quite common in British/Irish style beer halls in Sweden.

9

When it’s zero it’s freezing,
when it’s 10 it’s not,
when it’s 20 it’s warm,
when it’s 30 it’s hot.

10

The other important Celsius reference point is 37, which is the normal temperature of the human body.

11

…or 50, which is 120 degrees Fahrenheit.

12

As for whether we all have to die, I distinctly recall reading a news report at the time of the British conversion about a woman there who committed suicide becasue she just couldn’t cope with it. Probably an extreme case though.

13

I’m mostly metric, but encounter US measures (particularly of weight and distance) pretty often at school. I still find myself having to at least decimalize the fractions for distances smaller than an inch, and can’t remember the conversions at all, though I’ve got a decent sense of weights.

Seriously, in what world is 19/64" a reasonable number?

14

Four-and-twwnty blackbirds
baked in a pie…

I think the twenty-chunking is an archaic feature common to a lot of European languages.

Don’t despair about the French, though. In some dialects, you can say septante, huitante (or octante), and nonante. Just got to wait a bit for that to take over. Quatre-vingts-dix-neuf becomes nonante-neuf.

It was a pain when we had to say 'the year 1999": * l’an mille neuf-cent quatre-vingts-dix-neuf*. Boy was I happy when 2000 rolled around: l’an deux mille. :slight_smile:

I think we in Canada would be completely metric by now (although possibly understanding US units as well) if the Mulroney Conservatives hadn’t halted metrication in 1984. As it it, we’re stuck hideously in between. And I was dragged backwards into the world of feet and inches when I started drawing house plans.
:: mutter grumble ::

15

This is why I like the Fahrenheit scale as a useful day-to-day metric for weather. In most of the world, 0F is about as cold as it gets and 100F is about as hot as it gets.

16

Might have been the combined shock of metricization and decimalized coinage.

17

It’s as easy as 12 inches being a foot, 3 feet being a yard, etc., 5280 feet being a mile. It’s really very, very easy.

People mention their weight in terms of stone - “I’m 12 and a half stone”. They don’t tend to get more specific than that unless they really need to. Which is not often.

18

Neither of these are actually all *that *strange, they’re just base 20. English used to be in on it too, with counting in score, which is one unit of twenty. Don’t think that happens anymore, though.

Vigesimal In Europe.

19

Oh, and here’s an image of a scale:

As you can see, it measures in stones with pounds as subdividers. Big lines are stone, little lines are 2lbs (though mine has 14 little lines not 7). We don’t convert anything, we simply think in stone, in the same way that you think in pounds. So I looke at my scale and it says “12 stones, 6 pounds” - or about 12 and a half stone.

20

Then you go to the BWCA, where the portage lengths are measured in RODS.

And your head explodes.

A “rod” is 16.5 feet, or 1/320th of a mile