All the prepackaged items I could find in my cupboards that were over 1kg were labelled in kg - flour, raisins, pasta, rice, sugar, tins of biscuits - all in kg.
Blake is right that many, probably most prepackaged goods in packs under a kilo are labelled in grammes, but I think it’s a bit of a stretch to call selling by the kilo an exception - it’s too widespread to be an exception.
As for buying food, in Latin America, prices are in Kilograms, but most people order in grams for things like cheese and cold cuts and Kilograms for veggies. Europeans prefer to order their deli products in Hectograms which are 100 grams, a smart use of the system instead of sticking to grams and ordering in 100 gram increments.
Here everything is sold by the kilogram, including things like Twinkie bars or lollipops as well as potatos or flour. It’s mandatory by law to show customers the kg price of everything and it makes comparing prices very easy.
Why not ‘megagram’?
Probably because a metric tonne is not that far off an “ordinary” ton (not sure what the adjective should be). A metric tonne is about 2,200 pounds; a ton is 2,000 pounds. So, if you talk about a metric tonne and somebody is thinking of an “ordinary” ton they won’t be that far off.
The point about metric is that it makes sense. It’s not designed to compete measure for measure with imperial, it’s supposed to replace illogical disconnected nonsense with logical easy-to-grasp mathematics.
Actually, in my neck of woods I’ve never, ever seen hectagrams used. On the other hand, semi-frequently used units are decagrams. It’s quite convenient to ask for “twenty deca” of cheese.
I come from Australia, so I still spend a lot of time in Australian shops, where fruit, vegetables, meat and fish are generally priced per kilogram. Certainly, you can buy less than that, so you can ask for “200 grams of olives” or “half a kilo of prawns”, but (even for stuff like olives, where hardly anyone buys a kilo) they are priced in kilos.
None of this is actually getting very close to the question I’m asking, though.
I’m asking about the name specifically.
In particular, everyone who said “the gram isn’t the standard of weight, the kilogram is”
Yeah, I’m aware that this is what it says in the standard definition of the metric system.
However.
Take a look at that name. It’s comprised of the word “gram” together with the “please multiply me by a thousand” prefix.
Isn’t that a little odd? I find it odd. The base unit of weight ought to be the unprefixed name. The unprefixed name, gram is, like I said, too small to be of much use in day to day life.
Hectograms are quite common here, but in speech just referred to as a “hecto” implicitly meaning hectogram. Products are labeled in kilograms however, so hectograms are used mostly in speech.
There are at least three “tons”:
(1) The megagram, or metric tonne = 1,000 kg
(2) The Imperial ton, formerly used in the UK, which was 2,240 pounds = about 1,016 kg
(3) The US ton, of 2,000 pounds = about 907 kg.
The non-metric (2) and (3) above both contain 20 hundredweight, so that there are two different hundredweights as well.
It’s a sign that the Apocalypse is coming: even the SI people now give as their best answer: tradition. I mean, come on, man: they’ve been calling it that for over a hundred years.
You are absolutely right. Researching my previous post of MKS and cgs, I found this:
What I am making out of it, is that grams were the original base unit of weight, as obviously implied by their name and pointed out by you.
The system has evolved, and cgs was replaced by MKS and then by SI, the current system that takes Kg as their weight unit. But this is a later evolution.
Your initial observation is valid, grams are small. How small? Small enough that consensus was reached to start using Kg instead.
This is the kilogram standard mass. You show me a similar officially-accepted gram standard and we’ll talk. Until then, as noted by others, you’re wrong on multiple levels.
Asked and specifically answered, boss. Go back to my post #15 for details.
The answer is in your original cite. The unit “gram” already existed as an alternative name for 1/1000 of a grave. When the grave was abandoned by the French revolutionaries it was too late to change the definition of a gram - that would have caused confusion; and the existing gram was considered too small to be a useful commercial unit. So the name “grave” was replaced by the equivalent “kilogram” and retained as the base unit.
In fact, you use the gram whenever you have weights/masses in the range from 1 g to 999 g, because you try to avoid fractions. So you might buy 250 grams of butter, rather than a quarter of a kilogram of butter, and your tube of ointment might contain 30 grams, rather that 0.03 kg. So grams are used all the time, even though you rarely buy just 1 gram of something.
It’s similar with lengths: in the building industry, all lengths are specified in millimetres, partly so that you don’t have to actually name the units on plans and specifications. So a door might be 2400 mm high, rather than 2.4 m – if you put 2.4 on your plan, the decimal point might easily disappear, and you’d find yourself with a 24 mm door (about 1 inch high).
Wow, an explanation for that that makes sense! I’ve wondered why we use millimetres in building plans ever since I was in architecture school.
Or if you are building a model of Stonehenge for a Spinal Tap concert.
When I went to school it was FFF (furlong/firkin/fortnight) so I can’t really help.