You must log in or register to comment.
The 52% of the UK who voted for Brexit are, by all accounts, hopping mad about the metric system (or the “Napoleonic system” as some of them call it) and being forced to buy goods (other than milk and beer) in the supermarket measured in litres and grams. The Brits mocking Americans for measuring things in blue whales or monster trucks or whatever aren’t those people.
My understanding is that it was never required to sell things in metric, just to also include metric values. So you could still but a pound of bananas, but it had to also be labeled as 454g (or whatever a pound is in normal units).
The conversion rate depends on the type of pound. The imperial pound is indeed 454g, but the great British pound is actually 1.16€
“pound sterling” vs “pound sand”
The joke is that the British, while slow, managed to learn
And yet my English uncles are constantly telling me about how many stones they weigh, and my English aunts sending recipes that say to turn my oven to “gas mark 4”.
Those in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones. ಠ_ಠ (they measure weight in stones wtf)
Or masturbate in the daytime
“Lets go down to the pub to have a liter.”
(a pint is closer to half a litre but I don’t want to be that pedantic)
True “Lets go down to the pub for a 500 milliliter.” might actually be funnier.
“for a half-liter” or “halfa’-liter” don’t sound too bad actually
In (southern?) Germany (and other German speaking countries), we call it “Halbes”, which is just “half”. “Let’s head down to the pub for a couple halves” would work quite well.
just
halfa'sounds like completely normal british english, like cuppa
In South Australia (it varies by state and it’s a whole shamozzle) we call them pints even though they aren’t “pint” sized. It’s just a word for “the big one”. And if they sell imperial pints, they will suggest it.
But you can just say “go for a drink”
The imperial system isn’t special, every country used to have its own measuring system and in most of Europe, the pre-metric measuring systems used to be just as dumb as imperial. Brits were a bit late with metric and still haven’t fully adopted it, but that still makes them smarter than someone who sticks with the old crap.
The Brits were the largest economy in the world for the 19th century, and the largest in Europe until WW2, and followed up by the US. Being the largest economy means you get to keep your own internal standards and anyone who wants to do trade with you has to accept that. It’s not a coincidence that the UK swapped to metric after integrating into the European market.
pre-metric systems were perfectly sensible in the time they were made for, it’s when we started standardizing things and building precise machinery that they stopped making sense.
In the past there just wasn’t as much of a need for it, you don’t need standardized units and measurements to simply make something that functions, and when sharing measurements with others you can either get by with a vague “about 3 foot 4 inches” or you can literally give them the measurement on a physical object.
And when working like that it’s actually nice to have these kinds of units, an adult thumb is roughly the same no matter who and most people have at least one of them on hand.
Meanwhile I’m in the UK and everything is in miles.
Pretty sure those aren’t the same group of people
Same with association football aka soccer.
American here. I really wish we’d switched to metric back when we tried in the 70s, when I was a kid.
Someday we will, I hope. Probably not in my lifetime, though.
IMO, the UK especially has no room to talk when it comes to measurement systems. They still use an unholy hodgepodge of imperial and metric and on top of that they have just a few weird as fuck things, like using ‘stone’ to refer to people’s weight and nothing else.
It comes in pints?
Funny because the US does not use the imperial system and never has. The US made their own after their independence
And by “making their own” they put a wig and a pair of sunglasses on the British Imperial system.
