This idea of the US “standing firmly against the tyranny of the metric system” is like standing firmly against the tyranny of Arabic numerals-- we still trot out Roman numerals for special occasions (film copyrights, buildings, book chapters) but Arabic numerals took over because they are better for math.
The metric system makes sense once you get used to it, that’s why it spread to the entire globe, not because of some conspiracy or because it was done under threat of beheading like they (hopefully jokingly) claim.
We can still use teaspoons and cups and pints for your grandma’s old recipes, but I bet most of the time she just did it by eye: “that’s looks like enough flour, oh and pinch of salt.”
These guys really only sell outrage and victimization. Fox News has the business model perfected, everything is either turning our kids gay or “the first step” towards a dictatorship (IF it’s done by anyone on the left.)
{ETA: Think about this for a second-- these guys are bragging about how Americans are ignorant of something which is the standard in science, which everyone else knows how to use, and which is easy to use. It’s the perfect illustration of Fox News. Also, imagine if the metric system HADN’T taken over most of the planet, we would be converting pounds/quarts/miles into all manner of antiquated local measuring systems.]
Not in the UK. It’s an unholy mix of imperial, meric, and WTF.
ETA I’m USian but have long preferred metric (because it, you know, makes sense) so I can pretty easily code switch when traveling outside of the US (even though I still struggle with F to C). But things in the UK are just weird.
Well, I must be one French revolutionizing-mother-effer, then, b/c just the other day I had to figure out how many feet 84 inches comprised. After questioning myself several times, I finally cursed the English system out loud, looked skyward, and screamed at our ridiculously stupid system. Why, oh why, do we make this difficult on ourselves!?! And where the fuck is my guillotine?!
I recently saw a protest outside of my local public library by a group called “Texans against transgender tyranny.” Apparently the word tyranny has come to mean very different things for different people.
Or maybe some people just stopped caring about the meanings of the words they use
In Canada we’re the exact opposite; our units are officially in metric but most of the population still uses imperial colloquially.
For example all of our road markings are in km/h, we buy gas in litres, all food at the grocery store is sold in grams or litres but if you ask someone their height or weight there’s a 100% chance they answer in imperial. If I tell someone I’m 186cm tall they’ll have no idea what I’m talking about as everyone still uses feet and inches for height (despite having metric on our driver’s licences). Likewise if you go to the hardware store everything is sold in imperial, I don’t know how to buy the metric equivalent of a 2"x4" and I doubt the staff working there do either.
What’s weird is that imperial doesn’t seem to be dying out or if it is it’s doing so really gradually. I think people assumed that baby boomers would keep using imperial as that’s what they grew up with but the following generations would shift to metric but that’s not what’s happening. The one example I can think of is temperature as everyone under the age of 50 has embraced celsuis while older people still prefer farenheit.
Obviously the most elegant solution would be to genetically engineer the next generation of children to have six digits on each hand so we could switch over to a base-12 numerical system.
Though I cannot fathom why the US continues to perch on the imperial chain (and there must be a hundred links to the definition of that!) of anti-metricism. It rather goes against the grain. But advocating metricism in the US goes down like a stone.
All seven of the quoted units, above, are defined here:
Which is why schools used to teach times tables up to 12 (not 10) - especially in UK where we used to have duodecimal currency (12 pence in a shilling) as well as 12 inches to a foot.
Also Canadian, and I half agree and half disagree.
I agree about the general/personal split, that things have pretty much fully switched over in terms of distance, gas, and food (I kind of freak out when I come across the occasional deli counter or butcher that still measures in fractions of pounds because I’m totally used to hundreds of grams now. And we do still deal with having a lot of American cook books/cooking shows, etc. so having to convert stuff can still be as common as it might be in a country still just switching over). But, yeah, personal measurements just don’t compute, like a person’s height in centimetres I just somehow don’t automatically visualize how tall that person is on the fly like I do with feet/inches. I’ll probably stay 6’2" in my self-perceptions until
I die.
However, I’d say the C/F temperature conversion is pretty much complete; as an old (55, and I embraced it wholeheartedly when the switch happened when I was a kid, it seemed so much more logical) who deals with a lot of even olders, I know absolutely no-one still clinging to Fahrenheit.
Yup. That’s it. I knew of it because of my horology background.
Here’s a picture of a very unique watch from this time, made by A.L. Breguet, when he would have been in exile in Switzerland. It’s a watch with 2 faces- one side tells time normally, and the opposite tells time with the Decinary system France came up with. There are several other complicated functions of the watch, which would have only been possible to create at the time by an exceptional horologist, due to its complexity.
From the book “Watches & Clocks in the Sir David Salomons Collection” by Daniels and Markarian:
