Is it le trente-huite Cunegonde yet? 
That’s entirely possible.
I think begbert2 got the correct answer early on: Arbitrary/“artificial” units of measurement (which include weeks and months, as well as inches and grams and kilometers and degrees and tablespoons) exist because we invented them and use them. Some units (e.g. days) are more “natural,” but it’s still our choice to use them for measurement.
I think ‘Yesterday’ would maybe suit the occasion more succinctly
I’ve always thought we should switch to “metric time”. Hear me out -
There are in our system 86,400 seconds in a day. Let’s make that 100,000 seconds, each second would be .864 of a current second. That’s pretty close.
Now 10 seconds is a deci. 10 decis is a minute. 10 minutes and hour. 10 hours a deca. 10 deca make a day.
A minute metric would be 86.4 seconds, or 1’26". We can live with that. A metric hour is only 14 minutes, so we need the deca as a useful measure, 140 minutes. Two hours twenty minutes. A normal movie would run about a deca, with previews. A day is 10 decas. Is that too small a unit to be useful? An 8 hour day is under three decas. Might not be enough divisions to be useful. We’d maybe need half decas?
A week is ten days, a month is ten weeks, which is too long, so we’d have to use half months, or quarter months. We can call them halves and quarts. 
Unfortunately here is where the system breaks down. The year is 365.24 days, so we need a filler. That’s three and a half (and change) months in a year. So we can keep metric, or just go back to our current weeks, months years, but just metricize the day.
Or we can change the orbit of the earth to be a round number of days divisible by 100.
As for “hours” and “minutes”, well, the Romans liked dozens, and so they divided the day into a dozen parts. Each part of the day was called an “hour”. But these hours weren’t a fixed length. The day from sunup to sundown was divided into 12 parts, and so the length of an hour varied throughout the year. And since the day was divided into 12 parts, the night was also divided into 12 parts.
So why the heck did they do that? Why not have hours that are all the same length all the time? Because they almost never measured time by clocks, they measured time by the sun. If they said, “Meet me tomorrow at the crossroads at 10:00,” each person would coordinate their arrival by the position of the sun in the sky, not by looking at a watch, which they didn’t have. Time was measured by sundials, and sundials, being based on the position of the sun, will naturally vary as the length of the day varies.
In any case, more precise measurements were pretty difficult, and not needed. When do the peasants get up to go to work? Dawn. When do they take a break for lunch? Noon. When do they quit? Dusk. Welcome to the rhythms of the agricultural world.
The hours were also used for things like shift changes for soldiers, times to pray for monks, and so on.
If you wanted to get more precise you could divide the hour into small parts. “Minute” parts. How many? How about 60? 60 is cool, it’s 5 x 12. So you have tiny parts of an hour if you’re gonna be crazy about measuring the tiniest unit of time imaginable. Oh wait, you imagined a smaller part? OK, those are second minute parts, then third minute parts, and so on, each one 60 times smaller than the last.
Nowadays we’ve defined “second” as the fundamental unit of time, based on atomic vibration. All other units are derived from the second, and astronomical events like days, years, and so on are just calculated from observations.
In the distant future we might have slightly different systems. You could keep track of time on your spaceship by Earth clocks. Or if you move to Mars you could keep track of time by Mars days (Sols) and Mars years. Only do that if you’re going to be living on Mars for a long time. Or if you’re a researcher for one of the Mars rovers, some of those guys got on a Mars schedule so they could always be monitoring the rovers during the Mars day.
If you’re just zooming around in a spaceship in interstellar space you might as well just keep track of seconds. And kiloseconds and megaseconds and gigaseconds. A kilosecond is about 17 minutes. A megasecond is about 12 days. A gigasecond is about 32 years. This would work like Unix time, but we should probably add a few more digits in there before 2038. If we go to 64 bit time, then we’re good for another 292 billion years.
The only problem of course is if we have one twin traveling to Tau Ceti at a large fraction of the speed of light, and the other twin staying at home. Then their clocks won’t agree when the first twin returns home. It’s a disaster.
Because eight days a week is not enough to show that you care.
Regards,
Shodan
::sticks fingers in ears::
La la la la la la la la la
Fractions of. Haven’t you ever watched any Olympics?
I think it’s because the world is just a great big onion.
Regarding the “because they’re convenient” response: We’re using them because they’re convenient, but they’re convenient because we’re using them.
We don’t and won’t switch to another system because switching is hard, and because no matter how good a new system is, someone will complain.
I think that we should switch to the old Japanese system–it would be so much more fun to say “meet me at half past goat.”
Don’t forget the days of the (10-day) Chinese week: shells, fishguts, fishtail, nail, lance, threads on a loom, evening star, to offend superiors, burden, and disposed grass.
“Its monkey o’clock on a fishguts, the regular crowd shuffels in…”
Made of glass?
Aaand we’re right back where we started.
This. The metric system makes a hell of a lot more sense than what we use here in the U.S., what used to be called English measurement before the Brits went metric. Who knows what century it’ll be when the U.S. finally goes metric? Probably sometime after the global thermonuclear war.
I don’t know how other parents have felt about it, but trying to teach the Firebug our system of measurement when he was younger really brought home to me how totally stupid it is. Ounces, pints, quarts, gallons, ounces, pounds, tons, inches, feet, yards, miles…seriously, try to explain this to a four or five year old without feeling embarrassed about our silly units of measurement.
Presumably, they evolved because they were useful or convenient. A pint, a quart, or a gallon is a useful unit when talking about how much liquid. An inch, a foot, or a mile is a useful unit to use when talking about distance. Arguably more useful than a centimeter, a meter, or a kilometer.
The metric system only really makes more sense when it comes to relationships and conversions between different units. That’s where its clear superiority lies. And is that becoming less important now that everyone has easy access to electronic devices that can do conversions and calculations for them?
Yeah, Imperial units tend to just be based around base 12 or base 8 instead of base 10. They are useful in their own right. 2 gills is a cup, 2 cups is a pint, 2 pints is a quart, 4 quarts is a gallon, 2 gallons are a peck, 4 pecks are a bushel. These are pretty nice units for what they do.
A league is how far you can walk in an hour, a mile is how far you walk in a third of an hour. (Of course, we have more precision now dealing with rods and poles that were surveyors measures, but it’s still roughly the same)
So, Imperial units do make sense, they’re just not as easy to convert, but honestly, they aren’t that hard either. Saying how many inches are in 5 and a half feet should not be taxing to most of us.
And of course, it’s much better to say that the gallon is based upon the weight of wine rather than the liter which is based on the weight of water. It’s a sad state of affairs when it’s the French that decide to abandon units of measure based on wine in favor of measures based on water. 
I have plenty of devices that can do calculations, and on most of them, I can look up the conversions pretty quickly.
Still, even that’s a barrier. Increasingly, many of us don’t bother looking up something that’s one quick Google search away. How many gallons in a cubic foot? Sure, I can Google it, but unless there’s an immediate need, I’m not bothering. How many liters in a cubic meter? I don’t know that either, but if you use the metric system, it’s probably something blatantly straightforward.
(Looked 'em up. It’s 1000 liters in a cubic meter, and 7.48052 gallons in a cubic foot. The interlocking of different kinds of measurement - distance, weight, volume, etc. - is a strength of the metric system that’s almost totally absent from American measurement.)
This argument? Seriously?
A quart is a better measure than a liter? Why exactly? A mile is better than a kilometer? Yeah, because the other day you drove 5 miles, and expressing that as 8.04 kilometers is silly! You’re 6 feet tall, it’s inconvenient to have to say 1.8288 meters! Every time you use a traditional measure it’s a nice even number, but whenever you use metric it’s some gawdawful long decimal? Is that the argument?