Having been educated at school in entirely imperial, and with Australia (trust me) entirely metric, I frequently say to my husband when he names a metric measurement of something or other: 'How big is that in feet and inches?'
Also, I used to buy fabric from dedicated fabric shops, and a yard (or ell which I use when writing medieval hist.fict) ) was always the length they held out from wrist to shoulder . Made sense to me.
I know enough metric to do very basic conversions if I have to but in the kitchen, all my favourite recipes date back to imperial so I have the most fab scales and measuring jug which show both.
By the way, tomato sauce is tomato sauce here in Australia - certainly in our house and where we shop. And a meat pie will aways be with sauce, never ketchup. Same with fish and chips. Sauce all the way!
Yes! A yard of yarn or cloth is an entirely sensible amount, and so easy to measure, as you say. A clear instance where metres are the less practical options.
I also just learned from this page - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Units_of_textile_measurement - about the Momme, which is "(traditionally used to measure silk fabrics) the weight in pounds of a piece of fabric if it were sized 45 inches by 100 yards (1.2 m by 90 m)". Which is *a lot of silk*. How on earth THAT became a practical form of measurement must be a good story.
A question for you: you mentioned fish & chips. When animator Sam Cotton, who is from Queensland, does his silly bird videos (including using mine, here: https://www.threads.net/@mikeachim/post/C3drmJOt9xo) he refers to chips as "chippies". Is this normal in your part of the world, or is it just slang he's invented or is exaggerating for comic effect?
Golly, Mike, I don't know. Maybe some do it in my state or maybe its a Queensland thing. Every state has odd idiosyncracies and colloquialisms. I would maybe say chippies to my little grandson but it would be very rare.
By the way - the seagull dance is the bees' knees!
Ah, here we go. I grew up in England long enough ago to have used pounds, shillings, and pence, half-crowns, bobs, thruppenny bits, coppers, ha'pennys, and even farthings. And of course stones, pounds, and ounces. Furlongs and fortnights. Bushels and firkins. You'll find the latter in the expressions two firkin big, and two firkin small.
At school, I started with "Imperial", then metric in the form of cgs, then MKS, then SI. Chemistry at uni was metric, but work was ounces and gallons. Moving to Holland was metric, and then in the US, back to ounces and different gallons.
In Puerto Rico, distances are in Km, but speed limits are in mph, because everyone drives American cars. "San Juan 38 Km. Speed limit 50 mph"
I wrote on foolscap in England, A4 in Holland, and letter in the US (also used in Canada and the Philippines!)
Thanks for this, John. What memories - and what a confusing journey. Did you ever feel like shrieking "MAKE YOUR MIND UP!" at the world in general?
I was minus 8 months old when decimal currency was introduced to Britain, so I never got to use or understand things like thruppeny bits or farthings. But in the early 80s in Yorkshire there were still 5ps bouncing round that were repurposed shillings - https://www.etsy.com/uk/listing/634770513/1953-english-shilling-coin-great-britain - and I remember being mightily confused as a teenager by these things.
But oh, the old pennies - they were ENORMOUS. Not like the tiny ones nowadays, they were great thumping bronze medallions, and really quite lovely-looking - https://www.etsy.com/uk/listing/601621854/1900-one-penny-coin-great-britain-from . And I clearly remember the halfpennies, which lasted until 1984. They were a bloody nuisance, except as counters or money for board games or Dungeons & Dragons games, which they were fantastic at. I know they've all been melted down now, but I dream of finding a bag of 'em somewhere.
I just heard the same about Puerto Rico! Another reader emailed me to tell me. What madness - I love it.
Yes, it was a little confusing. For the birds, at tuppence a bag.
Those old pennies were huge. Not quite as big as the front wheel on a penny farthing, but you could see where they got the idea.
A cricket pitch of course, is one chain, or 22 yards long. A furlong, at 220 yards, is 10 chains. Snail's pace is a furlong per fortnight.
And then of course there's Fahrenheit. Somehow Celsius 232.778 doesn't have the same ring to it.
Speaking of heat, output of furnaces and the like here is measured in Btu - the energy needed to heat one pound of water one degree Fahrenheit. People here are between skeptical and offended when I tell them it stands for British thermal unit.
OMG I just loved this !! You should get one helluva shiny medal for this !! Last yr. I made a huge mistake of getting in a conversation on Social Media over this , I simply took the side of the Imperial system that I think & feel within it & can’t stop ( it feels good) I can look at a plane and tell you very very close it’s altitude in ft. even better at a cars speed ! Some guy in Europe made a T-shirt that simply said “6 Ft. 2 “ as someone was shocked when they asked people all over Europe how tall they were how many answered in Ft & inches ! Well people freaked out and started calling me stupid and an asshole ! I was like “ gee this is kinda petty shit here” the comments poured in, some showing off their math skills ! Oh oh ( I spent 46 yrs. in the Optical lab biz , Metric worked beautiful there ( but still mixed with Imperial ) so I replied that all the nasty folks here were unromantic boring poopy heads, I asked one guy if you buy a Condo with cool 10 Ft. ceilings your going to tell your friends “ your going to love my 3.048 ceilings “ oh and my new Mustang can do the 1/4 mile in 9 seconds your going to say “ hey you cool cats my Mustang can do the 0.402336 in 9 seconds, from now on don’t say “ hey honey I got you a “ dozen Roses” or hey Babe would you like a “ Cup of Coffee” no , you gotta say “ hey hun would you like 237 ml of Coffee ? I just read a recent article that the Pyramids were built using a system that the Imperial system came from and they still haven’t figured out the accuracy of those structures, apparently this is a very true story?? Hey give me an inch I’m gonna take a mile !
Thank you, Brian! So glad you enjoyed this piece, which taught me so much I( didn't know in the researching stage. Yes - it's one of those topics where some folk decide quite early on that they're OBVIOUSLY RIGHT and everyone else is OBVIOUSLY WRONG - which is the death of curiosity. Anyone who is completely convinced they're right and is aggressively self-righteous about it is not a good source of wisdom, I'd say!
Mike !! You Renaissance Man !! Very sweet response , we are in such a sad place in Humanity where we don’t enjoy another persons thought process or see their core , everyone seems to have this razor edge, scary as I now look back on people I disagreed with & now reminisce how much I learned from them and wish my attitude would have been better. Society lately seems so driven emotionally and not healthy emotions . ( no passion to learn )
Canadian here😊In 1975 when the country went metric my dad had the old neighbour s convinced that our house #’s were going metric too. He really wound them up and we all got a laugh😂🤣😂🤣
This genuinely changed the way I think about metric vs imperial - it reminds of Jay Griffiths’ Pip Pip: A Sideways Look at Time, where she explains that traditional local time might mean the specific colour of light hitting a certain leaf, rather than anything numeric.
Yes! I didn't think of that (what a terrific book, which I clearly need to re-read as I forgot that bit) - and also Olive Burkeman mentions in "4000 Weeks" that suggests medieval time didn't exist in their imagination & world view as we think of it now, and instead everything chronological was "task orientation...the rhythms of life emerge organically from the tasks themselves". Actually, that sounds a bit too much like making a living online. Yikes.
Time is such an interesting one, too - the way it's so deeply and weirdly subjective as experienced, and we can look at the clock and not believe the time that has passed or hasn't passed, making the measure of the "correct" time feel like we've been cheated in some way. Its ability to surprise us, and for our inner clocks to rebel so stroppily. Who knows what our brains will make of things when we start travelling at relativistic speeds - or start quantifying time in new ways? (eg. space being just a network of relationships in time: https://aeon.co/videos/time-is-fundamental-space-is-emergent-why-physicists-are-rethinking-reality) All very trippy.
The theoretical foundations of the metre is one side of the coin. The other is the practical challenges to its adoption. In 1796, sixteen reference metre rules were established near market places across Paris, for people to make their own copies for trading. One of them is still in its original position, near the Palais du Luxembourg.
As a Canadian, even though I still use both for different things, I fall firmly on the "metric is better" side. As a sewist, trying to subtract 1/4 inch from 5/8 of an inch is so much harder than subtracting 6 millimetres from 16 millimetres (or more likely 5 mm from 15 mm).
This is just...bonkers! But there is something so beautiful about measurements all being tied to the body...a handy ruler always available. Loved all of this!
I used to be an archaeologist, and (in the U.S., at least, I have never been an archaeologist anywhere else) we measured prehistoric artifacts in millimeters, test pits and excavation units in centimeters, survey distance in meters, and historic artifacts in inches and feet. I'm actually quite good at visually estimating both centimeters and inches, but I am absolute shit at measuring medium distances in anything but meters.
Really interesting article. I am a mixed up Brit! I use and think in inches for actually knitting. 4” the usual measure for a gauge swatch is approximately 10cms. However I know that 4” is 4 thumbs and tend to estimate it that way. I buy yarn in metric weights though and don’t think of it in ounces. Fabric I buy in metres but think in yards. I will still use the wrist to shoulder measurement to guesstimate yardage. Cooking varies on the recipe and I’m as happy in Imperial as metric for baking or buying food.
Great article, I loved reading it! And the comments are really witty and humorous. Born in Tanzania in 1962, it was all in ounces, inches and yards, but the metric system too. We used both. Living in Spain since 1975, EVERYTHING here is in Metric system only.
And yes, STOP is a universal sign.
Spaniards have what we’d call, a lazy tongue. It’s hard for them to pronounce the whole word when in another language, so they drop letters, consonants, change the pronunciation, etc. it’s so much fun!
It has been a lovely spring-like day today, with 19°C. 😁
The trick to shifting your mental processes is not to convert, but to immerse yourself, plunge into a new system.
Don't translate X degrees Centigrade = Y degrees F (I won't try to spell it), but to eat in the garden in early spring and note that 13*C is enough (nb only in spring, 13*C in the autumn is "cold" :). 23*C/ 24*C is very nice in the summer, 29*C is getting too high etc etc. Calibrate your experience against the new.
I now track my weight in kilos. I no longer have any idea what that is in stones & pounds. (UK-born here).
As a Yank living abroad, I've grown quite accustomed to dealing with kilometers, no problem. And I've learned to pretty much know what 20 degrees celsius feels like, but I do think Fahrenheit does provide a bit more accuracy in describing the temperature.
As for ketchup, did you mean catsup? And what do you need ketchup/castup for anyway? Don't you just put maybe on everything?
BTW, I'm currently in Valencia where that terrible mistake happened! I can sense I must not be far from it. Maybe 20 kilometers!
lovely and fun read! i have a jar full of my grandparents old shillings, pence and even a few farthings, i think.
BTW, In The Writing Burrow (@margaretatwood) had been doing a great series on the French Revolution. And, sorry, but there is more than TOMATO ketchup...mushroom for one! just when you thought it was safe to leave the kitchen untended. ;)
I loved this! As an American I grew up with imperial but I remember the attempt to covert us to metric in the late 60’s early 70’s? Wildly unpopular. lol. This isn’t about measuring but on my first trip to Italy I was surprised to see the Stop signs actually say “stop”. An English word.
Having been educated at school in entirely imperial, and with Australia (trust me) entirely metric, I frequently say to my husband when he names a metric measurement of something or other: 'How big is that in feet and inches?'
Also, I used to buy fabric from dedicated fabric shops, and a yard (or ell which I use when writing medieval hist.fict) ) was always the length they held out from wrist to shoulder . Made sense to me.
I know enough metric to do very basic conversions if I have to but in the kitchen, all my favourite recipes date back to imperial so I have the most fab scales and measuring jug which show both.
By the way, tomato sauce is tomato sauce here in Australia - certainly in our house and where we shop. And a meat pie will aways be with sauce, never ketchup. Same with fish and chips. Sauce all the way!
Yes! A yard of yarn or cloth is an entirely sensible amount, and so easy to measure, as you say. A clear instance where metres are the less practical options.
I also just learned from this page - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Units_of_textile_measurement - about the Momme, which is "(traditionally used to measure silk fabrics) the weight in pounds of a piece of fabric if it were sized 45 inches by 100 yards (1.2 m by 90 m)". Which is *a lot of silk*. How on earth THAT became a practical form of measurement must be a good story.
A question for you: you mentioned fish & chips. When animator Sam Cotton, who is from Queensland, does his silly bird videos (including using mine, here: https://www.threads.net/@mikeachim/post/C3drmJOt9xo) he refers to chips as "chippies". Is this normal in your part of the world, or is it just slang he's invented or is exaggerating for comic effect?
Golly, Mike, I don't know. Maybe some do it in my state or maybe its a Queensland thing. Every state has odd idiosyncracies and colloquialisms. I would maybe say chippies to my little grandson but it would be very rare.
By the way - the seagull dance is the bees' knees!
As for Momme - wow! I need to go into the etymology of that one - never heard of it and I LOVE silk for embroidery! Found this link.https://mulberryparksilks.com/blogs/mulberry/what-is-momme-in-silk-fabric
I can see a few journeys down rabbit holes coming up...
My wife would agree with you, but measuring rain in mm is much easier than bits of an inch!
You must be in Qld, fish and chips in NSW are always with vinegar!
Tasmania.
Ah, here we go. I grew up in England long enough ago to have used pounds, shillings, and pence, half-crowns, bobs, thruppenny bits, coppers, ha'pennys, and even farthings. And of course stones, pounds, and ounces. Furlongs and fortnights. Bushels and firkins. You'll find the latter in the expressions two firkin big, and two firkin small.
At school, I started with "Imperial", then metric in the form of cgs, then MKS, then SI. Chemistry at uni was metric, but work was ounces and gallons. Moving to Holland was metric, and then in the US, back to ounces and different gallons.
In Puerto Rico, distances are in Km, but speed limits are in mph, because everyone drives American cars. "San Juan 38 Km. Speed limit 50 mph"
I wrote on foolscap in England, A4 in Holland, and letter in the US (also used in Canada and the Philippines!)
Thanks for this!
Thanks for this, John. What memories - and what a confusing journey. Did you ever feel like shrieking "MAKE YOUR MIND UP!" at the world in general?
I was minus 8 months old when decimal currency was introduced to Britain, so I never got to use or understand things like thruppeny bits or farthings. But in the early 80s in Yorkshire there were still 5ps bouncing round that were repurposed shillings - https://www.etsy.com/uk/listing/634770513/1953-english-shilling-coin-great-britain - and I remember being mightily confused as a teenager by these things.
But oh, the old pennies - they were ENORMOUS. Not like the tiny ones nowadays, they were great thumping bronze medallions, and really quite lovely-looking - https://www.etsy.com/uk/listing/601621854/1900-one-penny-coin-great-britain-from . And I clearly remember the halfpennies, which lasted until 1984. They were a bloody nuisance, except as counters or money for board games or Dungeons & Dragons games, which they were fantastic at. I know they've all been melted down now, but I dream of finding a bag of 'em somewhere.
I just heard the same about Puerto Rico! Another reader emailed me to tell me. What madness - I love it.
Yes, it was a little confusing. For the birds, at tuppence a bag.
Those old pennies were huge. Not quite as big as the front wheel on a penny farthing, but you could see where they got the idea.
A cricket pitch of course, is one chain, or 22 yards long. A furlong, at 220 yards, is 10 chains. Snail's pace is a furlong per fortnight.
And then of course there's Fahrenheit. Somehow Celsius 232.778 doesn't have the same ring to it.
Speaking of heat, output of furnaces and the like here is measured in Btu - the energy needed to heat one pound of water one degree Fahrenheit. People here are between skeptical and offended when I tell them it stands for British thermal unit.
OMG I just loved this !! You should get one helluva shiny medal for this !! Last yr. I made a huge mistake of getting in a conversation on Social Media over this , I simply took the side of the Imperial system that I think & feel within it & can’t stop ( it feels good) I can look at a plane and tell you very very close it’s altitude in ft. even better at a cars speed ! Some guy in Europe made a T-shirt that simply said “6 Ft. 2 “ as someone was shocked when they asked people all over Europe how tall they were how many answered in Ft & inches ! Well people freaked out and started calling me stupid and an asshole ! I was like “ gee this is kinda petty shit here” the comments poured in, some showing off their math skills ! Oh oh ( I spent 46 yrs. in the Optical lab biz , Metric worked beautiful there ( but still mixed with Imperial ) so I replied that all the nasty folks here were unromantic boring poopy heads, I asked one guy if you buy a Condo with cool 10 Ft. ceilings your going to tell your friends “ your going to love my 3.048 ceilings “ oh and my new Mustang can do the 1/4 mile in 9 seconds your going to say “ hey you cool cats my Mustang can do the 0.402336 in 9 seconds, from now on don’t say “ hey honey I got you a “ dozen Roses” or hey Babe would you like a “ Cup of Coffee” no , you gotta say “ hey hun would you like 237 ml of Coffee ? I just read a recent article that the Pyramids were built using a system that the Imperial system came from and they still haven’t figured out the accuracy of those structures, apparently this is a very true story?? Hey give me an inch I’m gonna take a mile !
Thank you, Brian! So glad you enjoyed this piece, which taught me so much I( didn't know in the researching stage. Yes - it's one of those topics where some folk decide quite early on that they're OBVIOUSLY RIGHT and everyone else is OBVIOUSLY WRONG - which is the death of curiosity. Anyone who is completely convinced they're right and is aggressively self-righteous about it is not a good source of wisdom, I'd say!
Mike !! You Renaissance Man !! Very sweet response , we are in such a sad place in Humanity where we don’t enjoy another persons thought process or see their core , everyone seems to have this razor edge, scary as I now look back on people I disagreed with & now reminisce how much I learned from them and wish my attitude would have been better. Society lately seems so driven emotionally and not healthy emotions . ( no passion to learn )
Mike have you seen the SNL bit about the measurement systems from a few weeks ago? Hilarious and even addresses the missing vowels!
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=JYqfVE-fykk
I had not! Just watched, and it's glorious:
"How many litres are in a gallon, sir?"
"Nobody knows."
Thank you for this, Autumn. I'm adding it to my article because it's so perfect.
Isn’t it perfect?
“Except they don’t line up and they never will.”
Thanks for the hat tip as well! Perhaps it will entice me back to writing.
Very much enjoy your delightful essays and sarcastic notes!
Canadian here😊In 1975 when the country went metric my dad had the old neighbour s convinced that our house #’s were going metric too. He really wound them up and we all got a laugh😂🤣😂🤣
Ha! And I'm guessing there was a fair bit of that going around at the time. Perfect opportunity.
It's good to be reminded, in these dark days, that there really is a lot to like out there. Thanks!
Thank you, Joy. :) There always is. I fully believe it.
This genuinely changed the way I think about metric vs imperial - it reminds of Jay Griffiths’ Pip Pip: A Sideways Look at Time, where she explains that traditional local time might mean the specific colour of light hitting a certain leaf, rather than anything numeric.
Yes! I didn't think of that (what a terrific book, which I clearly need to re-read as I forgot that bit) - and also Olive Burkeman mentions in "4000 Weeks" that suggests medieval time didn't exist in their imagination & world view as we think of it now, and instead everything chronological was "task orientation...the rhythms of life emerge organically from the tasks themselves". Actually, that sounds a bit too much like making a living online. Yikes.
Time is such an interesting one, too - the way it's so deeply and weirdly subjective as experienced, and we can look at the clock and not believe the time that has passed or hasn't passed, making the measure of the "correct" time feel like we've been cheated in some way. Its ability to surprise us, and for our inner clocks to rebel so stroppily. Who knows what our brains will make of things when we start travelling at relativistic speeds - or start quantifying time in new ways? (eg. space being just a network of relationships in time: https://aeon.co/videos/time-is-fundamental-space-is-emergent-why-physicists-are-rethinking-reality) All very trippy.
The theoretical foundations of the metre is one side of the coin. The other is the practical challenges to its adoption. In 1796, sixteen reference metre rules were established near market places across Paris, for people to make their own copies for trading. One of them is still in its original position, near the Palais du Luxembourg.
https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/the-last-original-standard-metre-paris-france
As a Canadian, even though I still use both for different things, I fall firmly on the "metric is better" side. As a sewist, trying to subtract 1/4 inch from 5/8 of an inch is so much harder than subtracting 6 millimetres from 16 millimetres (or more likely 5 mm from 15 mm).
This is just...bonkers! But there is something so beautiful about measurements all being tied to the body...a handy ruler always available. Loved all of this!
I used to be an archaeologist, and (in the U.S., at least, I have never been an archaeologist anywhere else) we measured prehistoric artifacts in millimeters, test pits and excavation units in centimeters, survey distance in meters, and historic artifacts in inches and feet. I'm actually quite good at visually estimating both centimeters and inches, but I am absolute shit at measuring medium distances in anything but meters.
Really interesting article. I am a mixed up Brit! I use and think in inches for actually knitting. 4” the usual measure for a gauge swatch is approximately 10cms. However I know that 4” is 4 thumbs and tend to estimate it that way. I buy yarn in metric weights though and don’t think of it in ounces. Fabric I buy in metres but think in yards. I will still use the wrist to shoulder measurement to guesstimate yardage. Cooking varies on the recipe and I’m as happy in Imperial as metric for baking or buying food.
Great article, I loved reading it! And the comments are really witty and humorous. Born in Tanzania in 1962, it was all in ounces, inches and yards, but the metric system too. We used both. Living in Spain since 1975, EVERYTHING here is in Metric system only.
And yes, STOP is a universal sign.
Spaniards have what we’d call, a lazy tongue. It’s hard for them to pronounce the whole word when in another language, so they drop letters, consonants, change the pronunciation, etc. it’s so much fun!
It has been a lovely spring-like day today, with 19°C. 😁
The trick to shifting your mental processes is not to convert, but to immerse yourself, plunge into a new system.
Don't translate X degrees Centigrade = Y degrees F (I won't try to spell it), but to eat in the garden in early spring and note that 13*C is enough (nb only in spring, 13*C in the autumn is "cold" :). 23*C/ 24*C is very nice in the summer, 29*C is getting too high etc etc. Calibrate your experience against the new.
I now track my weight in kilos. I no longer have any idea what that is in stones & pounds. (UK-born here).
As a Yank living abroad, I've grown quite accustomed to dealing with kilometers, no problem. And I've learned to pretty much know what 20 degrees celsius feels like, but I do think Fahrenheit does provide a bit more accuracy in describing the temperature.
As for ketchup, did you mean catsup? And what do you need ketchup/castup for anyway? Don't you just put maybe on everything?
BTW, I'm currently in Valencia where that terrible mistake happened! I can sense I must not be far from it. Maybe 20 kilometers!
Valencia, as in Spain? So lovely! Catsu’ or catsup all the way in Spain! Ole! 💃
lovely and fun read! i have a jar full of my grandparents old shillings, pence and even a few farthings, i think.
BTW, In The Writing Burrow (@margaretatwood) had been doing a great series on the French Revolution. And, sorry, but there is more than TOMATO ketchup...mushroom for one! just when you thought it was safe to leave the kitchen untended. ;)
I loved this! As an American I grew up with imperial but I remember the attempt to covert us to metric in the late 60’s early 70’s? Wildly unpopular. lol. This isn’t about measuring but on my first trip to Italy I was surprised to see the Stop signs actually say “stop”. An English word.