Episode 2013: the imperial system strikes back

(not ‘having a go’ at diesel – just concurring)
“Encourage parents…”? Having become one very recently I’d feel very patronised by such ‘adult re-programming’ – bl**dy h*ll ! That’s a comment that has made me more ‘Imperial friendly’ as my son will be. Incidentally – I’m not anti-metric, I just prefer imperial ‘usually’ but comments like that can easily add another viewer to the anti-metric brigade.

Being Welsh – I’m aware of dual road signs. Note that around ‘the valleys’ it’s English first and Welsh underneath – everywhere else it’s the other way around. LOL at the recent mileage sign on the west of the M4 telling me how far it was to Llandain (no guessing where that is). However even the English will quickly understand troedfedd, llath, and millitir as Wales shares the same unique road signage (incidentally – without saying ‘symbol’ there is no ‘k’ in the Welsh alphabet.

Anyway – there is room for metric and imperial. Anyone who wants metric only MUST hate imperial and thus you have to ask – ‘why do i hate a certain way of measuring things’?

Please note – a bit obvious – but on top of a possible strengthening of the already curriculum ‘imperial measures in common use today’ there is the obvious sublime teaching of imperial outside school. Remember the ‘millitir’ ?

What is the point of dual language road signs when you can have single language road signs? What is best “Llandain 40 miles/millitir” or “Llandain 65 km”? The latter is international – the symbol (note symbol, not abbreviation) “km” is the same for all languages and has the same value in all countries (unlike the gallon or the pint ).

Martin – see, I *knew* you’d say ‘symbol’ and you didn’t let me down 😉
Quickie though…

‘km’ think of the ‘micro-‘ symbol as comparison to non-alphabetic chars.

In Wales it *IS* one distance ‘milltir’ or ‘m’ (I know you don’t like the ‘m’ being pinched from your favourite system but the 2 languages start with the same letters. Sorry – got the spelling of mile wrong btw.

The sign says, btw – “London 170 m” and underneath London is ‘Llandain’. My initial surprise was seeing ‘London’ being translated for the first time (I think) on the M4 sign. The mileage, btw, is a non-accurate guess.

There seems to be a helpful change in the signs btw.
Whereas ‘170 m’ would be quoted twice – there’s just one ‘m’ (same with llath). Maybe it’s just a few or something – perhaps I picked up on it due to it looking peculiar – perhaps in the same way as seeing ‘km’ would be.

“A bird of prey has a wingspan of imperial 6 ft: metric: 1. 83 metres.”
Which bird of prey was that? It must be a different bird to the one I was thinking about which had a wing span of 2 metres.
!

Peter

I have given some thought to the age and education of contributors to this and the previous imperial vs metric Conversation and I think you are right. I suggest that we should give priority to the views of younger adults and think about what current schoolchildren will have to cope with.

As I have explained earlier, I can cope with metric and imperial units, in the same way that many are fluent in two or more languages. Thanks to the previous Conversation, I have stopped using imperial units when in conversation with older people, using them only when it is clear that they are confused. which has happened only twice. I work for a charity and have quite a lot of conversation with middle-aged and elderly people.

Your example of the wingspan of a bird of prey is rather contrived. What about a bird with a wingspan of 1 metre, which would correspond to about 3 feet 3 inches?

I measure my tyre pressures in bar because I have a label that shows the pressure in bar. I would prefer if we standardised on kPa because I see value in standardisation, and the SI system is the best we have in this respect. When I was doing research we used steam autoclaves ranging from the size of a domestic pressure cooker to a couple of cubic metres. Some of the older gauges were calibrated in PSI and the newer ones in bars, but these values were converted into kPa for reports, dissertations and theses. It makes sense to use whatever units the gauges show, but it also makes sense to communicate in SI units.

Unless some effort is made to move on and standardise on metric units, the imperial system is going to have a lingering death and make the population of the UK look disorganised, and deserving of pity by those countries that have moved on.

wchange – do you honestly think that the world outside ‘pities’ the UK for using miles, yards etc? This line of thinking also comes in the comment “we’re a laughing stock of the world”.

It’s not that way and to most its obvious because the thought is silly and extreme.

I worked in the European HQ of a huge company which happens to be in the UK. There were many people from Italy, France, Germany, etc. None of them laughed at ‘mile’ signs or took pity. In fact the reverse happened. They were generally inquisitive of the units, e.g. why is a foot called a foot when it cannot be the size of everyones foot and talk of certain people ‘putting on an inch of make-up’. Most, if not all really liked the units and were eager to ‘speak the lingo’ in the same way they were proud of their English usage. The ‘mile’ was extensively used and a German was interested in realising his trousers were not a ‘size number’ but in fact were inches.

When you go to other countries for an extensive time you tend to *want* to emulate and talk the lingo. Well except trying a Jamaican accent in front of Jamaican people. That just sounds ridiculous and you *would* be a laughing stock!

Measures are really not as big a divide as the minority suggests. UK’ers of all ages just naturally use it with no harm to anyone as it’s used today. Also there was a poll that showed teens-to-twenties were the group to most prefer imperial and I think this might be (intellectual or ignorant) a response to EU’ize us as many who didn’t go through decimalisation (like me) and possibly thought that decimalisation should have been the time for metrication – maybe – and thus makes a bigger minority that prefers metric – if you get my drift

We make too much of this “pity” and “divide” issue. My family are in engineering and are metric in business, as is general in the UK. Our small use of imperial and our preferences in our private lives do not disadvantage the UK internationally. We are looking at whether schools may give an understanding – not a promotion – of the obsolescent imperial system. Hopefully we will hear from DoE what the current situation is.

“small use”
“obsolescent”

I really don’t think hundreds of thousands of road signs and cars qualifies for either of those.
I really don’t want to post a huge list of usages but a few examples –
Roads,
Traffic talk (personal & radio),
Car economy on petrol,
The main pub “booze”,
Pizzas,
dual use in loose foods,
“illegal” use in street market loose food,
Personal characteristics,
Enthusiasts “Car language” eg. “though’s”, inches of chairs (as is on aeroplanes), steering wheel, list too long and semi-pedantic to go further,
Most hobbies,
dual or singular in HiFi/ TV talk
Total generic almost unnoticed use in daily use in personal communication
LPs,SPs
Sometimes dual for DVD/CD
Computer usage

Oh heck – list getting long, shutting down…….
Shutdown time has arrived.

Most are personal and not relevant to our international trade and standing.

Yes, I agree – but I had to ‘sort of’ standup against ‘we IN THE UK use it any less’ and obsolescence.. It’s embedded. It might be found in our DNA 🙂 The human aural traffic in a busy day in a green park somewhere (perhaps avoiding findsbury). It’s people.

The metric system DOES make things easier for people. I’m not a nerd. I’ve never been interested in maths. It was my least favourite subject when I was at school and I avoid it whenever I can. Living in Australia, as I do now, I find the small amounts of calculations required in day to day life are easy due to the metric system being so firmly entrenched here. I even find myself doing simple calculations in my head to pass the time when I’m bored.
For example: The building I live in has a small lap pool. It’s about 15 metres long by 5 metres wide and has a constant depth of 1 metre. I don’t enjoy any exercise but I force myself to swim lengths because I’m 65 years old and I need to lose weight. It’s boring swimming up and down so I find myself working out in my head the distance I have swum and relate it to my 5 km walk home from work and the distances between the the various landmarks on my route. It’s easy to work out that 5 times up and 5 times back is 150 metres. That means 50 times up and 50 times back is 1.5 km. I still haven’t achieved that distance (I’m a lousy swimmer) even though it’s not far in comparison to my walk home from work . I also easily worked out that the pool contains 15 x 5 x 1000 = 75000 litres of water so it weighs 75 tonnes. I weigh 90 kg so it’s around 850 times my weight.
Today I travelled by tram ( I don’t always walk) to my daughter’s apartment which is signposted as 2.5 km from where I live. There were 10 more or less equally spaced stops so it doesn’t take a genius to work out that they’re round about 250 metres apart.I never knew that.Silly little things but none of these calculations would be easy using imperial units and I wouldn’t even attempt them.
They’re easy here because of the metric system. Metric measurements are the default. The ones used in science, industry, transport and the media. I sometimes read the British newspapers on-line and I cannot understand why everything has to be so old-fashioned and unnecessarily complicated with measurements. An example from a story in the Daily Mail about a sniper:
“……….It is only designed to be effective at up to 4,921ft – just less than a mile – and capable of only ‘ harassing fire’ beyond that range.” – I looked that measurement up and it’s 1.5km
“………..How quickly they travel over 1.54 miles”. – 1.54 miles is 2.5 km
Another Daily Mail story talked about MPs getting allowances for 52 gallons of petrol even though petrol is only sold in gallons in the US and they’re different sized gallons to imperial gallons!
I looked up 52 imperial gallons and it’s 200 litres.
Why continue to complicate things like this? Why patronise the public by constantly weeding out metric measurements and replacing them with rough imperial equivalents when the original measurements are perfectly logical?
I work with a lot of British expats and they’ve all adapted totally to the straight-forward way of doing things here and laugh at the muddle of measurements back in the old country like they would laugh at an eccentric old relative who refuses to have his house connected to gas or electricity. They can’t understand why I even bother to write to British websites since I spend most of my time here. I don’t know why I do it myself except that I am still very fond of the country where I was born and hate to see it decline from a world-leader in technology to an Olde English theme park for Americans due to a fear of change and a misguided sentimental patriotism. Every day I see how much better the changeover to the metric system was done in Australia and I’m ashamed of how badly it was handled in the UK.

The Daily Mail is a stupid reactionary paper which assumes its readers are of similar ilk. Last bastion of Victorian imperialism.

Better not read the bbc news site or listen to the radio/tv

first item i clicked on was about the EDL(far right) clash with a far left organisation – apparently they were ‘about 100 yds apart’.

Sorry 🙂

(I can already hear the tapping keyboards of complaints)

MalcR: I did mention “Personal characteristics”.

…. land for sale,
conversational
dimensions of houses sold at estate agents,
clothing sizing,
conversational,
wheels & tyres,
the press,
conversational,
the mass media,
examples in Europe,
Did I mention ‘conversational’?……

You daydream about the metric system. That’s a new one on me 🙂

Why continue to complicate things like this? Why patronise the public by constantly weeding out metric measurements and replacing them with rough imperial equivalents when the original measurements are perfectly logical?

I agree, they should convert to imperial and ’round up/down’ to a sensible number. No-one needs it so complicatedly silly. It happens the other way too. There’s a carpark near me that shows an imperial height then in metric rounded to the exact millimetre. Would anyone seriously read that bit?

It’s fine for ex-pats learning your metricated stuff and ‘talking it’. It annoys me in Spain where ‘settled Brits’ make no attempt to learn a bit of Spanish.
Rest assured I know many ex-pats too who return here now-and-again. When they’re back they quickly re-adapt. It’s just part of the ‘merging in’ process. I am talking about young people though, not specifically retired people. There biggest moan is of another conversion. The AU$/UK£ rate.

Do they truly ‘laugh’ at words that describe lengths and heights, distances, that sort of thing? Really? Do they laugh at American sizes too? Or French accents?
Incidentally – you might find that many Australian goods are still in imperial. You’d be surprised.
I’m glad you retain a fondness of the country you left to go to the other side of the world – you still have a ‘patriotic edge.

There is no need to worry about any decline (there isn’t one) as a world leader etc. Apart from the Empire being retired we now have other ‘high output’ countries. This includes China who are a huge economic power now. India will probably follow along with some ‘ex-communist’ countries. I’m aware that Australia make suncreams – do they make anything else? I believe it’s a service economy (finance, insurance, that sort of thing) which does not matter at all. The only other thing that bothers me is ‘who is Australian’. There seams to be an over site of the real one’s – aborigines. They probably had their own measure system as their culture is very rich and unique.

I don’t understand the Theme park thing, sorry.

Finally – are you really ‘ashamed’ of imperial usage in the UK due to metrication ‘bad handling’ (it’s actually a personal choice thing, but that’s fine) – every day? Seriously – every day?
My mind is full of wanting to go to Barbados for a big holiday, my little-one growing half-an-inch per day, my grandparents, job, cash in the bank, that sort of thing. Ok, this metric thing is fun but it does not envelope ‘every day’ of my existence. Too many other good things really.

This is a long-winded way of saying “Nothing is changing”.

The notion of imperial ‘holding us back’ or ‘costing us’ or a factor with unemployment has always been a desperate argument with no way of proving or substantiating the claim (or in-infact counter claiming it). One of the largest economies in the world has no problems.

There used to be a ‘metrication expert’ (how the hell do you get that title?) who originally helped a metrication effort abroad before becoming so submerged in the issue that it clouded his judgement and caused him to make wild and weird theories. Unfortunately a terminal disease means he is not ‘with us anymore’ (I might have thought his views were nonsense and ridiculous but any loss of life is tragic, regardless of argument/view point.

He suggested that the USA economy had lost a trillion dollars a year by not using words like ‘metre’ and ‘gramme’ and so on. The ‘laughing stock of the world’ argument is equally silly (believe me, there is no Brazilian individual who is currently ‘ROTFL’ due to the word ‘pint’).

Psychiatrists refer to the problem as ‘awfulising’.

As an aside – many husband/wife or family arguments lead to awfulising.

I find it fascinating that some individuals practise this oddity when referring to measurement words.

I have a four year old.

I can tell you that walking into a book shop will show you that curriculum based books mention imperial rather frequently.

I remember a question about a train and a cyclist and how far they had travelled if they both set off at the same time (speeds were shown in mph).

Some answers showed decimalised miles where – surprisingly (to me) – some answers showed miles and yards.

There is a big difference between what industry, commerce and all work-related organisations should use – metric – and what we may choose to use in our personal lives. Education should (and is I believe) teaching metric – whislt imparting knowledge of other measuring systems. If someone, through age or background, can visualise something better in imperial than in metric or simply chooses to use imperial in their personal activities then we have no right to either force them into other ways, nor to criticise them. Have we?

A further way of saving billions of pounds would be for David Cameron in his In/Out
negotiations with his fellow european leaders would be for him to concede Imperial measurements for metric within the U.K. on the understanding that the rest of Europe adopt English as it’s first langauge.