v for frequency?

There's lots of those; in US, 'statute mile' for land measure is different from 'mile' for distance, and 'ounce' can be fluid ounce, avoirdupois ounce, or troy ounce. Calorie for thermodynamics (c) is 1/1000 of the 'calorie' for nutrition (C). Also 'dozen' can be twelve, or 'baker's dozen', 13. The reasons, of course, are history...

I think the whole world would like the US to go metric, then the imperial system (or the US version of it) would finally die the death it should have had many decades ago.

I realised that the US didn't use stones for measuring weights. In the UK, it's common for people to give their weight as "14 stone 5 [pounds]" rather than "201 pounds". But that's probably the only context in which stones are still used as "folk units".

The thing that made me double-take when I was on holiday in Massachusetts (*), was road signs, especially local signs and road-works signs, which used feet even for fairly long distances: "Road works in 3000 feet". Hmm, I need to do a quick calculation: that's 1000 yards or about about 0.6 miles. In the UK, distances on road signs tend to be expressed in yards (for small distances) or fractions of a mile (1/4, occasionally 1/3, 1/2, 3/4 mile). And trip milometers in cars express distances in tenths of a mile. I'm not saying that UK's convention is better or worse than US's - just different.

On the other hand, dates expressed as MM/DD/YY defy logic because the units are not in ascending or descending order of significance: DD/MM/YY (UK) or YY-MM-DD (ISO something-or-other standard). I tend to express months in letters because "11 Mar(ch) 2023" means the same throughout the English-speaking world, even if an American might express it as Mar 11 2023; on the other hand, "11/03/2023" might be Nov 3 2013. There are exceptions: even in the UK, we refer to "9/11" because it happened in the US so their rules apply.

(*) I can never remember the single and double letters: I need to remember, it's 2s, 1s, 2t!

Yes, I think the use of stones and pounds for weight, and feet and inches for height, are gradually dying out here in the UK. I'll have to ask my nephews, who are all in their twenties, what units they use.

I'm one of those half-and-half people: I tend to estimate in imperial and know my height/weight in imperial, but I *always* measure in metric. Interestingly, temperatures in weather forecasts changed more recently than the introduction of imperial/metric rulers and tape measures, but I never think of temperatures in anything other than Celsius; apart from "special temperatures" like 32 F for water freezing, 98.4 F for typical body temperature and 212 F for water boiling, temperatures in F don't mean anything to me.

I know that the ounce has three different definitions: Troy, Apothecaries (use by dispensing chemists) and Avoirdupois. But is the pound identical in each case: are the a slightly different number of troy, apoth and avoir ounces in a pound?

I've just turned 60 so I was learning arithmetic in the late 60s and early

70s. I remember being given a text book of "sums" to do, with instructions to ignore those on certain pages which got you to add/subtract feet/inches, cwt/stones/pounds/ounces and £sd, because those were "old fashioned" and would soon be obsolete. I can *vaguely* remember pre-decimal coins, but really I can only remember going along to the newsagent to buy my sweets and being told that I mustn't use those coins next week. I think in practice shops accepted pre-decimal "copper" coins for a while after, to allow people to use up their coins, but you were always given change in "new pence" and shops presumably had to bag up pre-dec coins separately when paying their takings into their bank. And somewhere I think I've still got the white mug that every child was given with conversion tables "6d = 2 1/2 p; 1 s = 5 p; 2s = 10 p; 2/6 = 12 1/2 p" etc.

I'd go for the second: one egg but two yolks, and "are" refers to the yolks, not the egg. Except, of course [I've not fallen into your little trap] the yolks are *yellow* ;-) (You nearly had me there!)

I remember the Hitchcock film "Frenzy", set in London, with all the characters being English. And someone was described as weighing "100 pounds" or whatever. I'm surprised none of the cast mentioned that use of pounds alone, as opposed to stones and pounds, was exceptionally rare in the UK. In a similar vein, in the first Harry Potter film, Professor McGonagall says "dinner will be served momentarily" - an American usage of the word: in the UK, it means "*for* a while" or briefly, transiently; in the US it means "*in* a while" or soon.

NY snipped-for-privacy@privacy.invalid wrote

I know my weight in kg and height in feet and inches.

Me too, but still don't do house block sizes in metric when reading real estate ads.

100F still means something to me, but not oven temps anymore.

Hectares don't do much for me any more than sections probably mean in the UK. (260 hectares). That gives rise to Americanisms like '40 acres and a mule'. or 'back 40' A section is a mile on each side, or 640 acres. Land grants typically were fractional parts of a section so anything that isn't a factor of 640 wasn't going to happen. Blame it all on chains and furlongs.

You should have went to New Hampshire. Easier to spell.

The interstates tend to be 'right lane ends in 1/2 mile'. Where it switches to feet is arbitrary. I don't think I've ever seen yards used in a traffic context. Fabric measurements and American football are the prime uses of yards. I shoot so I have a fairly good grasp of yards and would be more likely to say '50 yards away' rather than feet.

For reasons I can't even remember if I writing a check or something I'd usually write 25 Mar 23. It seems the first thing doctors or pharmacists want is your birthday so I use mm/dd/yyyy.

When programming I use ISO-8601 conventions although there are several flavors. yyyy-mm-dd.

It seems that the US industry likes the imperial system and especially the huge number of standards based on imperial units.

Smells like protectionism !

When a foreign company wants to sell something on the US market, it has to adapt to these standards. Not a big deal if you intend to sell millions of units on the US market, design a product variation for the US market. It is however problematic if you try to sell only a few (expensive) units on the US market, causing much extra cost due to the paperwork and adapters.

Thus,due to the extra cost some foreign companies may stay away from the US market and that is what the US industry wants.

Of course, the different standards are also a problem for the US industry, but once they have made a metric version, it can be sold in the rest of the world.

Hmmmh... fired up "units"*. Omitting the price of an ounce of gold etc., I get:

You have: search ounce apounce troyounce brfluidounce 1|20 brpint fineounce troyounce fluidounce usfluidounce mercounce 1|15 mercpound metricounce 25 g mounce metricounce ounce 1|16 pound ouncedal oz ft / s^2 romanounce uncia sailmakersounce oz / sailmakersyard 36 inch shoeounce 1|64 inch timeounce 1|8 timeostent towerounce 1|12 towerpound tronounce 1|20 tronpound troyounce 1|12 troypound usfluidounce 1|16 uspint

Thomas Prufer

• a tool which allows conversion (and calculation) between different units/systems of measurement. Installed in unix flavors by default (ISTR), also available for windows.

I think you'd be surprised. 1/2" plywood is actually 0.451 inch or close to 12.5 mm. A lot of container sizes are integer numbers in the metric system and oddball rational numbers in the "traditional" system. Nutrition labeling is in grams. Every time you measure a volt or an ampere, you're using the metric system.

Scots use the word in the US sense.

Swedes, Japs and computers like that format.

Sorry, I was thinking about "presently", which, in England means in "a while" and in Scotland means "going on at the moment".

In England (and I suspect also in Scotland), it's actually used in both senses, eg "I'm presently in the pub, so tell my wife I'll be home presently". However, the duration of the second one can sometimes be rather flexible!

Both my Toyota car and Suzuki bikes are fully metric. Quite a few other products use metric fasteners. My Harley and F150 sneak a few in here and there. afaik all autos use the ISO 7736 DIN (50mm x 180mm) system for audio components.

That's not to say US standards don't keep some products out but it's usually safety or EPA standards. afaik no French car manufacturer has bothered to comply with the US safety standards in decades.

Am 26.03.23 um 18:48 schrieb Ian Jackson:

But HP was filmed in Scotland, so that would be ok :-) I saw the HarryPotterExpress in & near Mallaig; the engine man and his assistant would have been fit for filming just as they were.

< >

The length of a minute depends strongly upon on which side of the toilet door you happen to be.

Cheers, Gerhard

"Ouncedal" reminds me of the slightly more widely known "poundal" which IIRC is a unit of force which accelerates a mass of one pound by 1 ft/s^2, the imperial equivalent of the newton which is the force to accelerate 1 kg by 1 m/s^2. Then there's the "slug" which is 32.17 [etc] lb, where gravitation acceleration is 32.18 ft/s^2 (aka 9.81 m/s^2). Is there a metric equivalent of value 9.81 kg?

Then you've got all the pre-metric cgs (centimetre, gramme, second) units like ergs, where 1 erg is 100 nJ.

KISS: adopt the metric system, like the rest of the world.

I hadn't realised that "presently" (but perhaps not "momentarily") was used differently in Scotland. I suppose it's akin to "messages" which in England are written notes carried by messenger or sent by radio etc, whereas in Scotland the word can also be used to mean "errands" or "shopping". I think even in England it's one of those ambiguous words, rather like "cleave" which can mean "cut in two" (as in a meat cleaver) or "stick together" - one of those words which is its own opposite ;-)

At first, when you said that it was "momentarily" that was used differently, I thought perhaps the writer had been very clever, because McGonnagall is Scottish (though the actress Maggie Smith is not). But I think it was just an American screenwriter and a lack of anyone saying "hang on, that's not what it means in the UK". A wise writer would have avoided the word "momentarily" altogether and conveyed the "soon" meaning using other unambiguous words such as "soon" or "in a few minutes".

And the scene was shot at Alnwick Castle, I believe; certainly a lot of the other Hogwarts interior scenes and the learning-to-fly-a-broomstick scenes were for HP and the The Philosopher's (US: Sorcerer's) Stone.