Memes

degree centigrade

Or, as it's called in the rest of the world, degree Celsius.

Used to be worse, to quote messers Pratchett & Gaimon.

"NOTE FOR YOUNG PEOPLE AND AMERICANS: One shilling = Five Pee.

It helps to understand the antique finances of the Witchfinder Army if you know the original British monetary system

Two farthings = One Ha'penny. Two ha'pennies = One Penny. Three pennies = A Thrupenny Bit. Two Thrupences = A Sixpence. Two Sixpences = One Shilling, or Bob. Two Bob = A Florin. One Florin and One Sixpence = Half a Crown. Four Half Crowns = Ten Bob Note. Two Ten Bob Notes = One Pound (or 240 pennies). Once Pound and One Shilling = One Guinea.

The British resisted decimalized currency for a long time because they thought it was too complicated."

Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett

Except if you're measuring whisky, in which case you use drams. If in a UK pub, a dram may be either 25 ml or 35 ml. Elsewhere, who knows.

I feel like the only reason they use stone for weight is to get lower numbers. Plus, you can gain 13 pounds, going from 252 pounds to 265 pounds and still be 18 stone.

oh another thing British pints aren't the same as US customary pints

This is the first time I hear about "stone".

It's 6.35 kg for anyone too lazy to look it up.

Distance -> Yes -> "Are you in an aeroplane?" -> Nautical miles

Whenever we visit the UK we set the GPS units to metric. I have no feel for what, "In 140 yards, turn right", means. So having directions in metric while the street signs are in Imperial actually works best.

Though there is an extra exception on the weighing people thing. If it's a scientific or medical setting then the measurement is in kg (because official organisations are meant to use metric (though some of the weirder elements of our current government are trying to undo that for reasons)).

For those confused on the outside as to why we do this to ourselves there is sound reasoning. We switched to metric quite late having mostly done it to align with the EU. This means our largest demographic (boomers because of course) were brought up on an imperial measurement education. That means colloquially people use imperial as that's what they know. Officially most things are done in metric now but imperial measurements are included with items on sale to help the metric challenged generation. Metric is what is taught in schools with imperial only taught as a "if you encounter an imperial measurement this is what it is in metric". Though obviously there is a bit of a drag effect because when everyone else is using Imperial for measuring a particular thing, of course the kids are going to use that measure as well.

Road and speed signs stuck with imperial as the cost of replacing literally everything is greater than the value it would bring (especially given the demographic knowledge issue). And alcohol is measured in pints as the concept of a British pint is a cultural heritage (plus the extra 68ml compared to our European brethren is a bonus).

The aim was the eventually phase out imperial entirely as the people who weren't educated in metric gradually die out, though there as I said there are a bunch of government who decided for some reason to try and push officially switching back to Imperial for the sole reason of "let's diverge from the EU for the sole reason of being able to say brexit actually had a point to our boomer voters".

That's what you get when you suddenly switch from imperial to metric 🤷. It's a bit more "tidier" (from what I know) in the US. They started putting up distance signs with both miles and km in some states, so people get a general idea of how they correlate to each other... which is good I guess. I mean, most of the world has a general idea how to convert a mile to a km (it's 1.6, but I use 1.5 to get a general ballpark figure), while only military personnel over there have an idea of how much of a distance a km is.

They still measure weight about anything flesh or food related in pounds though.

What is a stone

For me personally it's all metric… unless I am talking about the height of people. So I can respect this mess. :P

Ah! That's reassuring, I thought only Canadians making their lives arbitrarily complex when measuring things.

Having lived in places that used both systems, I have to say - I'm objectively on board with distance and weights in metric, but I've been less on board with temperature. The Celcius scale is good for science, but less useful for human measurement than Fahrenheit is. Fahrenheit zooms in closer to the human experience of temperatures (around 0F/-17C to 100F/37C) and so allows for slightly more variation when describing temperature in sets of 10 (that range of 100 digits in Fahrenheit is only 54 digits in Celsius, so it makes Celsius feel roughly half as detailed when talking about it). Anything below 0 in Fahrenheit is unbelievably cold. Anything above 100 is unbelievably hot. Celcius centers on freezing/boiling, which I get, but that's not terribly useful for daily human purposes; namely weather. The temps from around 40 to 100 in Celsius aren't useful to humans. It's all just "really fucking hot". So I give a big thumbs up to everything metric except for Celcius.

I find that if something is under one foot people will often use CM (and would definitely use MM for anything really small.) So lengths tend to be: miles, meters, foot & inches, cm, mm.

What about distance being mesured by time??? Something's 15 minutes away?! Just tell me how far, blimey! :D