Thread by @UKCougar

A South African friend was bemoaning that she found the differences between American and British English really confusing, particularly around weights and measures and the British interpretation of Metric, so I tried to explain. [a thread]
/1

The British approach to the Metric system also confuses the British. We’ve got this messed-up hybrid approach where we’re technically Metric but back in the 1970s we took to change like a duck to custard.
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Examples:
We buy petrol (gas) in litres, no exceptions. But we measure fuel efficiency in miles per gallon. No-one under the age of about 45 knows what a gallon is, but we know how many miles we get out of one.
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We buy milk in litres, except we can’t quite let go of the concept of “a pint of milk” so a small bottle of milk is 568ml. (The UK pint is bigger than the North American pint because a fundamental core of the Imperial System is “bollocks to consistency”.)
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Beer is also served in pints because if we suddenly decided to change to half-litres that’d be a 68ml smaller measure and there would be a civil war and I’m not even joking.
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Compare with buying beer in the US, I was once asked “would you like a small or a large?” and I was like WTF does that even mean?
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(Aside: there’s a new pizza place just opened local to me and they offer small, medium and large pizzas. I have no idea what this means, I don’t know what to order. I’ve seen small pizzas the size of a drinks coaster and...
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...large ones that had to be tipped at an angle just to fit through the door, throw me a bone here. Don’t you have a tape measure? It shouldn’t be this difficult.)
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We use metres and yards pretty much interchangeably if the quantity is “about…” Countdown markers to motorway exits could be in Metric or Imperial but who cares when you’re doing 70mph and who the frak over here even knows what 70mph is in Metric.
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I know my height in feet and inches, no clue in metres. Similarly, my weight is in stones and pounds. We weigh nothing else in pounds and I don’t know as any other country uses stones. *We* don’t use stones even, other for that one thing.
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Someone in the US may say “this guy weighs 200lbs” and I have to convert it to stones in my head to work out whether he’s a fat bastard or not _despite it being the same gorram system_ 🤷‍♂️
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Buying timber, you might get a plank 3m long and 4″ wide. No, me neither. Don’t even get me started on plumbing standards.

The height of a horse is measured in hands. Because of course it is.
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In cooking and baking we don’t measure dry ingredients by volume because that’s the sort of bottled insanity likely to summon Cthulhu.
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A US Customary cup, a US Legal cup and a Metric cup (yes really, that’s a thing, I’m looking at you now Canada) are all different things.
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(Whilst we’re on the subject of cooking: a pack of cake mix is not a recipe ingredient, doubly so if it’s a specific brand which is unheard of outside of North America. Please stop.)
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Many older people here still haven’t worked out Metric, I think by this point it’s just wilful stubbornness. The old boy next door to me (in his 70s?) was getting a gutter repaired a couple of weeks back, he wanted a short replacement piece and the roofer told him...
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...“I can only buy them in five metre lengths.”

He replied, “I don’t know what that is.”

Oh come on mate, you’ve had FIFTY YEARS to grasp that a metre is about the same as a yard, this isn’t rocket surgery.
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I chipped in, “it’s about 16 feet, Richard” and he looked at me like I was some sort of witch doctor.
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Oh, and on spelling, it’s “metre” and “litre.” It just is. I’m not one to rag on Webster’s English (Simplified) revisionism and the US can happily keep it’s “color” et al, no-one _really_ cares beyond friendly teasing, but “liter” is flat out wrong.
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Sorry America, you know I love you but we need to talk about this. They’re French units, if you can cope with Notre Dame (even if you can’t pronounce it) then you can deal with metres. Get with the programme.
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TL;DR – Here Be Dragons. Use Metric. Hope this helps. 😁
/21 /fin

Addendum:
Good Christ, it gets worse. Motorway countdown markers are in yards, unless they're temporary in which case they're in metres. Go home Britain, you're drunk.



(Hat-tip to @jamesrgrinter for this snippet)