Canada has gone soft metric, in that we all use Celsius for temperature and kilometres for distance but most people I know still give their weight in pounds and their height in feet and inches. We find being in Europe much easier for temperature and distance since it has been metric for us for so many years. That said, we have a quick conversion of kph to mph developed over time so it is automatic. Temperature not at all.
Australia has gone fully metric but as Steve said there are still a few old timers who still give their height in ft and inches. Interestingly our son born in 1978 is a chippie (carpenter) and said while he was an apprentice some of the older tradies still worked in feet and inches but he had no idea what they were talking about!
Mike, that's really funny about your son!
I understand that the entire nonAmerican world uses the sensible metric system (with the exception of, weirdly, Liberia and Myanmar). However, I was wondering about you personally (and others raised outside the US), and whether you have to think about the conversion. If you see a temperature of 80 F, does your brain know that it's 26.6 C, or does it give you pause?
Unsurprisingly, on this end, very few American can convert it without doing the math although, interestingly, people in the medical profession use Celsius for recording temperatures and therefore automatically convert it, but only the numbers around 37 C.
It's all a bit of mess with the measuring systems in the UK. Particularly people of my generation (kids of the 90s) were largely taught the metric system in school, and exclusively used it in science and maths (sic), but the imperial measurements lived on in the wider culture. So all the road signs are in miles and there is a sign on my road indicating traffic humps for 1000 yards, beer and milk is sold in pints etc.
Weirdly this hasn't lead to most people having an easy conversion between the systems, but rather just using different systems for different types of measurement. So I know my height in feet and inches but my weight in kilograms, and measure air temperature in Celsius, rainfall in mm, but windspeed in mph. Even though I'd measure someone's height in ft, I give short distances in meters. Petrol (sic) fuel efficiency is still given in miles per gallon - even though fuel is sold in liters!
Miles to km has become intuitive, but the others still don't immediately connect without "calculation". US media is definitely pervasive, but doesn't seem to help here. In The Wire they talk about a "40 degree day" as being not one thing nor the other. I genuinely had no idea how to interpret this!
I tried converting pounds to kilograms in my head but it only led to mass confusion
Jon, that's fascinating! I had no idea that Brits were so schizophrenic! Thanks for the interesting post.
A 60-something cycle touring friend who was born in imperial England, but has lived here in metric Australia since childhood occasionally boasts on tour that he’s ‘ridden a triple’ on his heavily laden yellow Thorn Nomad.
I was thinking to myself, ‘Ian you often ride triples, what are you on about?’. Of course I was wrongly thinking that intrepid Ian meant a triple as 100 kilometres. He meant 100 miles!
So my new theory is that thinking in imperial or metric measures is a genetic trait.
Jeff Lee commented in a Forum post about whether people who favor "tyre" find the American spelling equally jarring.
It made me wonder about other nonAmerican differences, specifically, whether you have to calculate the difference between metric and Imperial units, or does it happen automatically in your brain. The same with Celsius vs Fahrenheit... is American media pervasive enough to have caused you to know without calculating?
And, on a side note, how long does it take an expat to easily calculate the differences?
1 year ago