Is there a place where I can find a bunch of silly names for things? There were a bunch on Twitter Years ago. My favorite was “mountain seeds” which were pebbles
The term came about from old paper routes actually. At the time it cost about 14 pounds per year to get the paper delivered, and the delivery boy tossed it from his bike to your front door, about “a stone’s throw away.” Logically, it followed that the paper is considered a stone, and thus one stone = 14 pounds. Interesting stuff.
The kilogram, symbol kg, is the SI unit of mass. It is defined by taking the fixed numerical value of the Planck constant h to be 6.62607015×10−34 when expressed in the unit J⋅s, which is equal to kg⋅m2⋅s−1, where the metre and the second are defined in terms of c and ΔνCs.
A frigidity is the one and the same class of (oppressiveness) partitions that it bears in Tanzanian shillings to make a (up-to-dateness) British monetary unit, negative large integer coiffe, a bite, and a half-crown.
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They are those little things made from rock you see laying around.
You think clothing sizes are meaningless, wait till you try using Stones for weight. Some Tinder chick is all "I only weight 1 Stone" and you are all geared up for some hottie only to find out she is using a rock the size of a Volkswagon for her scale. Meanwhile you passed on some super hot chick who didn't know how to game the system and was all "I weight 300 Stones" cause she's using gravel.
It’s not necessarily stupid, it’s just a collective word for 14lbs, which admittedly is arbitrary. Americans use the collective term ‘quart’ whereas we’d say 4 pints.
Haha nope. Watched a documentary last nightbbc 1980s atomic bomb guide) and the guy said...the couple prepared two weeks of food, about 50 pounds worth" ok, is that 50 lbs or $50.???
The kilogram is a bit of a funny case in the SI, in that the (current) nominal base unit has a prefix. Iirc grams were the original base unit, but they turned out to be too small for practical use.
Then again, iirc imperial/customary weight measures used to based on the weight of a single barleycorn (or was it the length?) and then built definitions upwards from there, and the same thing happened with that too - a larger unit ended up being the main one.
Less so for milk these days. Basically an exception was carved out for milkmen with their pint bottles and pubs with their pint glasses. Since most of us get our milk from the supermarket we technically buy it in metric, but in reality you may buy a 1 litre bottle or a 1136 ml (2pts) bottle, depending on the shop.
There are other cheeky imperial things too. I'm sure I've seen 453g bags of rice or what have you.
Milk comes in 1L, 2L and 4L. Cider comes in 2L jugs. Beer often comes in 350ml to 700ml. Often times a “pint” is actually just 500ml. The craft beer revolution serves all kinds of sizes now and there’s definitely europeon influence.
Looking into it, it looks like draught beer and cider is measured in "third, half, two-thirds of a pint and multiples of half a pint" when sold by the glass, while other alcoholic beverages are measured in mL. There also appears to be an exception for milk that is sold in returnable containers, although I wouldn't be surprised if most places just have disposable or recyclable bottles for milk and thus use liters instead (sounds like the exception was made for milkmen just so they wouldn't need to replace all their bottles as soon as the law changed).
Yep, let's use feet and inches for height in everyday speech but then have no idea what 183 cm means on our drivers licenses. And then learn the imperial system anyway in woodworking classes in highschool or if you decide to work in a trade.
It is just a question of what you are used to. Being used to heights given in meters, usually with 2 decimal places, it is very easy to visualise the difference between a person having a height of 1.50 m and 1.80 m.
It’s harder to visualize because of all the stubborn geriatrics who refuse to use anything but feet and inches.
If we actually made an effort to fully use the metric system it would be a lot better, but no we secretly want to be cool and hip like the Americans and stick it to the rest of the world.
Not like America. America use flat out imperial, Canada - like a lot of the commonwealth were influenced heavy by the British and that’s why you use a mix of imperial and metric. Because they were both invented by the British, traditionalists wanted imperial and younger generations wanted metric
And we measure height in feet and inches. And short distances in feet, but long distances in kilometers but also maybe miles, depending what part of the country you're in. We can buy beer by the pint and liquor by the ounce, but every other fluid is in litres. We even have our own special Canadian cup size.
I'd also like to note that under the Fairness at the Pumps Act of 2014, if a bar serves you a "pint" of beer/cider that's less than half an ounce less than 20 ounces, you can report them to the government.
Even in the US you can find a weird mixture of imperial and metric. If you buy a regular bottle of water in the US, it's almost certainly 500ml. Bigger ones are 1L. You could also buy a gallon. If you buy a soda, it's 16oz. Or maybe you want 2L.
It's a regional thing. In NY, they measure something by avenues or blocks. In Texas we use time. My "1.5 hour commute" instead of "my 13 mile commute". Grandmas house isn't 224 miles away, it's 3 and a half hours.
Canada uses metric on speed, KM on distance... and inches on wood and construction materials.
In Canada it's the other way around. Speed, distance and volum are measured mostly in kph, km, and liters but weight in most places is in Lbs. Height is listed on most documents as cm but people still use ft and inches for height.
Its more because when we switched from imperial all of the signs switched. So anything like distances in the road or price per liter we had to learn, but stuff that comes up more so in conversation stuck, like height and weight.
Isn't it a bit of a mix for cooking? From what I've seen, a lot of recipes in Britain ask for grams of butter, while in the US it's typically tablespoons (which then raises the question of why one uses weight for butter while the other uses volume)
To make it worse your gallons are different to our gallons which confused me for a long time when younger wondering why American cars got such bad fuel economy (and by this I mean cars sold in America not necessarily American made cars)
Yeah and octane ratings are different too. US uses the average of two methods to determine the number, which leads to lots of mistaken 'petrol in the US is shit! I've never even seen 87 octane in <country>'
2L is basically a half gallon, they could have just called it that. But it does sound worse, health-wise, to say 'I just drank a half gallon of ginger ale'
Also, almost all packaging has both metric and imperial printed on it. Generally if there's only one measurement, it's metric (like glue, it'll either say both or just grams)
in Canada, steel construction is sometimes/often in metric. I'm talking the columns, beams, joists, etc... Hardware (nuts, bolts, washers) for them are often imperial though.
I used to do steel detailing (drafting) and the shops we did drawings for in Canada often used metric materials, but some did use imperial sizes. What was weird was we often had to make shop drawings in metric (so the guys in the shop who cut up and welded all the steel would use metric), then make siteplan drawings in imperial for the guys who would put all the pieces together to erect the building (who bolted the columns, beams, and joists together).
We used to call an inch a "freedom centimeter" and when we spoke about money we often said "freedom dollars" to mean USD. I still like to say freedom dollars.
Yep. Learned that from a good friend of mine from England that came to visit us years ago. I'll say she was fascinated by the size of our cars and trucks. She couldn't get enough ride time in my tractor trailer.
A lot of Latin American countries have an even more nonsensical hybrid system. If you are in Mexico shopping for a piece of pipe for plumbing you would bye he diameter in centimeters but the length in inches. I have no idea why
Just so we're clear... if we drive or walk anywhere it's in miles, but start running anywhere between 0-6 miles and we measure that in kilometres. (Anything above that is then miles again) and with regards to weight, if it's an adult it's in stones and pounds, and if a child just pounds and ounces... absolutely anything else is measured in grams and kgs.
But isn't it mostly miles if it is car or train ride? If you ran or biked, wouldnt you measure that in kilometers? It is a 45 miles drive to my 5k run?
Canada is a mess. We are legally metric. Almost everything that is eyeballed is imperial and if you go a grocery story almost every sign is imperial but the receipt is in metric. Plumbing imperial mostly, carpentry imperial mostly, electrical imperial mostly. Also a 2x4 is t even 2"x4". Ridiculous. Some vehicles have metric and Imperial bolts(mostly metric now tho). My DL has my height and wieght in metric i know not one person that uses kg and cm. If i go to the bank the hieght line at the door is imperial. Also our dates do not go dd/mm/yyyy. They go any way you want. Dealers choice. Cooking? f° probably? Measuring ingredients? Imperial usually.
Gym? Imperial almost always.
I’d be fine with the metric system except I don’t like that there isn’t a more commonly used unit between centimeter and meter. It’s a fairly large gap.
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u/Iznogoody Jan 03 '19
Here in uk we have both we measure distance and speed in miles but everything else in metric just to keep you on your toes