People on British TV and radio shows I take in almost invariably use miles and gallons, and not just the cranks on Top Gear. I can understand the Doctor being slow to take it up, being that the mental conversion in and out of systems used on billions of planets across billions of years can take a toll on his 1000-year-old brain, but Torchwood and UNIT avoid metric units, too. But it feels like Discover is treating us like children when they continue to give measurements only in American units, which is odd because Science is done in metric. They don’t even give them in both!
The British street signs, gas pumps, and speedometers I’ve seen are solely metric, requiring people to make mental conversions into their preferred units. Do the conversions make up in the backward British brain for the way decimalization of the currency took the challenge out of making change?
We are mostly metric. We basically keep the imperial measures for two main reasons - either the imperial unit is especially convenient (e.g. in pubs most beer is sold in pints [although outside of that one exception almost all drink is sold metrically]) or where there’s little reason to change as the units are used for one particular pupose - for example we use miles and miles per hour for roads, miles and chains for railways, feet inches and stones/pounds for human height and weight. Plus we have the imperial gallon still to measure miles per gallon but I reckon only 1 brit in 50 could tell you what a gallon actually is. Similarly horses have imperial units to describe them as do many animals, and there are various other examples like that.
I think it’s actually in reality a typical British fudge, and something to be proud of, like most of our fudges, in that they are based on pragmatism. We haven’t been dogmatic - we’ve moved with the times and can use metric measurements to interoperate with the rest of the world, make maths easier, and so on. But at the same time where there are useful benefits in keeping the old system, we haven’t dictated upon people to change things (with rare exceptions, see the sunderland banana matyrs) and have just kept the status quo.
Everyone benefits really
Edit: Just noticed what you said about British street signs being metric. They’re not, you know - with the exception of pedestrian signs which are sometimes in yards, sometimes in metres. But all speed limits are in mph and all proper distances are in miles (or fractions of miles). Neither are speedometeres metric, although they are most often imperial and metric (albeit that the imperial usage is always given priority). “Gas pumps” are metric, but then petrol is sold in litres. Gas, of course, is sold in kwh
Fun fact: In the Isle of Man instead of selling spirits in pubs by the measure, which is 25ml, we sell them by fractions of a gill. I had never heard of a gill before I moved here, I just wonder if Americans who are probably more used to me with the imperial system have?
My mistake. I mis-saw on the TV. Are speedometers in dual units? Ours aren’t anymore. And is part of the problem that the metric system is not only French, but from after they stopped having a proper king?
Speedometers are almost always in dual units, but by no means is that something that can be relied upon. Apart from older vehicles, the main exception is digital speedos (but of course they can be toggled).
It has nothing whatsoever to do with the French provenance, whether it did a hundred years ago I’ve no idea. And by the way the last French king died in 1850, and Napoleon III, the last monarch, died more than twenty years after…
I’m Canadian, but we use the same “bar units” as Americans. I would be totally unfamiliar with gills, except I was in the UK in the 1980s and saw signs in pubs advising what fraction of a gill was considered a “shot” as I would understand it.
The mental arithmetic turned out to be too much, so I just drank pints of beer.
The SI is not French, different countries proposed different units to be adopted. The universal monetary unit was supposed to be the peseta, but unlike the rest of the SI it was used by a single country.
This seems to be changing, slowly. Quite a lot of younglings IME know their height and weight either only in metric, or in metric first.
Also while miles and mph are pretty firmly entrenched as the units of large distance / fast speed, metres are starting to push yards out for smaller distances I reckon.
But for the OP, yeah we’re metric but didn’t go the whole hog like the rest of Europe; we kept pints and miles, and though in shops and official contexts we moved away from pounds and feet, colloquially they still persist.
That was the system in mainland UK up until relatively recently. Spirits were sold on sixths, fifths and quarters of a gill. I suspect that the quarter measure was only in Scotland though. Some pubs here sell the roughly equivalent 35 ml measure still.
It’s illegal to post street signs (or speed limits) in metric measurements here. Also illegal to operate a car with a speedometer that reads in kilometres only (visiting foreign vehicles get an out from this for the duration but it’s registered here you have to convert it)
I hate metric measurements, and try to consciously avoid using them if possible.
I clearly recall news stories in the '80s or '90s in which Brits were appalled that their membership in the EU would be the death of ordering beer in pints. I thought it odd because 500ml is more than a pint so it would be almost like getting free beer.
Okay, it’s been demonstrated that I am shockingly misinformed about the UK, but why does Discover, despite being all sciencey, avoid metric units?
The standard seemed to be one sixth (at least around London). I remember a sign in a bar at Stansted airport (the old, cozy one) proudly stating “We sell spirits by one fifth of a gill here, meaning that you get more value for your money”.
500ml is more than your puny US pint, but both are dwarved by the mighty British pint at 568ml. To this day beer and milk are sometimes sold in 568ml containers.
I think we (the UK) should just go metric entirely.
Switching to km from miles would be relatively painless, and we could redefine a pint as 568ml, or switch to 500ml pints, whatever.
Virtually no one understands gallons, farenheit is just a nuisance for most people, and using stone/pounds/ounces for weight is an unneccessary effort.
Unfortunately this has all become mixed up with resistance to EU laws and a stupid little Englander mentality that means we have to use outmoded measures that the rest of the world doesn’t understand.
Well I agree with with Mijin that stones & pounds and feet & inches are already being edged out by metric. Nobody uses ounces much, do they? I awlays have to stop and think what an ounce is. Fahrenheit is only used in “Phew, what a scorcher!” newspaper headlines (they never use Fahrenheit for cold temperatures, though).
As for gallons, they are tied to miles because AFAICS they only turn up in miles per gallon measurements. I wouldn’t object to changing to km, and that would take care of mpg too.
for the way decimalization of the currency took the challenge out of making change?
