I usually say that my height is 72 inches when asked, in the USA. I’ve never thought that this was uncommon. Most people that ask aren’t in the USA because here I’m average height so my response is usually 1.83 meters when in countries where my height is a novelty and people ask.
I’m not sure why I use whole units for one, and decimal for the other. Probably because I detest the use of mixed unit in the English system. When the pediatrician weighs our daughter, for example, why-oh-why does she report 20 lbs, 8.3 ounces? That’s mixed units and decimal! And medicine is science! And most of our physicians are from metric countries!
Eh, they’re still using the SI: etto is short for ettogram, hectogram. Depending on the scale they may even be able to set it to hg; it’s less common than the thousand-points but the software isn’t more complicated.
It allows them to report what they think is a more precise number without having to tackle decimals.
My favorite unit, from one of my clients: instead of Units or Pieces like normal people, they used the THousand.
I suppose I could. But as I come to think of it, had I never bought a truck or had a gravel driveway, I don’t know that I would have ever used a ton as a unit of measure in my life.
Honestly, the only time we used it is in hyperbole, “Geez, what you got in this suitcase, honey? This thing weighs a ton!”
Clearly, we know what a ton is, but to conceptualize it, I think it is easier for most Americans to do so in pounds, even if it is a large number. And I think that was the whole point of the statistic about the Saturn V: Look at how hugely large that thing was!
I really hope that wasn’t the point of that statistic. “We’re going to use phrasing that’s deliberately hard to understand, so you will experience awe rather than understanding.”
No problem with parsecs. Astronomers use that much more often than light years. The conversion between ly and parsec is easy enough that I can do at least an approximation in my head.