There is a joke, told during the final days of the Soviet Union when there was a new openness. At the back of a church stood a KGB man, watching the congregation shuffle out after the service. When the church emptied, he sneered at the priest. “Ha! We have nothing to fear from your church, your congregation is nothing but old women.”
“Yes.” Smiled the priest in reply. “But we have an inexhaustible supply of them.”
We seem to be in a similar situation with metric and imperial measurement in the UK. I know a lot of Americans think that Britain is metric. The truth is much more complicated.
In 1896 an Act of Parliament made the use of metric measurements legal, but not compulsory. It was not widely taken up. There were advocates of metric of course, the sort of obsessive, enthusiastic wankers who have worked out the “best” way to fold a napkin (or make tea, tie a shoelace etc.) and cannot understand that others have their own preferences, they would make any other method illegal if they could.
Metric got its big boost in 1965, when as part of the plot, sorry, plan, to make the UK fit into the shiny, exciting new Europe, metrication became Government policy. Since then, the “voluntary” programme of metrication has crept through Britain like cancer. Not voluntary at all, bit by bit law has been used to force the British people to abandon their own measurements. In the early 1980s I was in the last year of my school to be taught both systems.
Today, measurement is part of the cultural gap between grandchildren and grandparents. I’ve mentioned before about the gap between generations on the EU question. I can’t help but think that part of the obsessive zeal behind not just bringing in metric but forcing out imperial has a kulturkampf element to it. A country doesn’t just connect people across distance, but across time. An extra barrier has been put not just between children and their parents and grandparents, but between them and Shakespeare, and every other writer in English over the last four centuries. There may be no direct connection between feet and inches and trial by jury, presumption of innocence and national independence but they all come from the same cultural landscape. As more of that landscape is stripped away the easier it is to change the rest.
That said, the Commissars of Conversion have not had it all their own way. Our old measurements have deep roots and they’ve resisted being pulled up. Officially we still measure road distances and speed in miles and yards. Draught beer and cider are still sold in pints (British pints are 20 fl oz, not 16 remember that if you’re drinking over here) as is milk in returnable containers. Land is still in acres and precious metals are in troy ounces. Even for things sold in metric there is usually an imperial equivalent posted, although it cannot be more prominent than the metric. If it is, or if you don’t put the metric at all, you can be prosecuted, and people have been.
Beyond the official situation there is the cultural. It’s not uncommon for older folk to ask, “What’s that in English?” when faced with a metric measurement in a shop. Despite the best efforts of the EU freaks kids do still talk to their families and they learn naturally. If you ask an 18-year-old English lad who’s not been taught feet and inches how tall he will still tell you he’s 6’ tall, not 1.82 m. When baby Archie Mountbatten-Windsor was born the newspapers here announced he was 7lb 3oz, not 4.02kg. Especially when it comes to people metric just feels wrong.
If a man says he’s 1.82 rather than 6’ is he any shorter? No, of course not, yet he would somehow feel less of a man, more of a thing, just a unit. This is not just familiarity either. I was taught metric at school and have used metric, when it’s been appropriate, all my life. As Messrs Whittle, Ott and Green have said, metric is just not poetic. It’s scientific, cold.
Not that imperial is haphazard. Metric enthusiasts often say it’s more “accurate” than imperial. Horse elbows! Exactly an inch is just as exact as exactly a centimetre. Accuracy is determined by the quality of the instruments being used and the care taken in using them. The units of imperial fit people better, fit our world better, having evolved, rather than being imposed on the world like metric.
We are told it’s “too confusing” to teach kids both systems and to have them both in use at once. Yet we teach kids whole languages without frying their brains and for years I worked on large, old printing presses built in Germany in metric, maintained and adapted by English fitters in imperial (AF and Whitworth) and they worked fine. The factory was owned by an American company and they very much appreciated having a workforce that knew both systems. To this day you’ll hear both systems used, often in the same sentence, even from younger people. With temperature we tend to use celsius when it’s cold and fahrenheit when it’s hot! At almost every stage metric has been adopted by Government fiat, not due to adoption by the people.
The vaunted logic and simplicity of metric isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. Recently I was ordering a sign for another department. The young woman in that department, a graduate who only knows metric, emailed me that the sign needed to be 445ml x 555ml! Funny how with such a logical, simple system a clever person can order sign using a unit of liquid volume rather than length. The dreary unanimity of the nomenclature of metric gives rise to many mistakes. Mix up your m with your mm and you’ve got very big rabbit hutch. No one ever mixed up inches with feet, ounces with pounds or pints with miles.
Metric is fine for scientists, or if you want to work out the cubic capacity of your gas chamber, the kilometres of rail track to your Gulag or how heavy your basket of severed aristocratic heads is. Bit extreme? Maybe, but I really think that the “metric mindset” did play a role in the atrocities I’ve just alluded to. Imperial grew up with people and fits them, metric is imposed on the world, and totalitarians have no compunction in making people fit, even if it means cutting bits off.
So, take a lesson from the old country. If you don’t want to lose an important part of your cultural heritage or engender a mindset that sees people as units, then resist metrication, even if it does seem logical…
Don’t give them an inch, or they will take your feet, yards, miles…
9 replies on “Don’t give them an inch…”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tbNlMtqrYS0
Prosecution for posting information in a different system of measurements is tyranny. Laws like that are precisely why I am a conservative. They serve no function to further freedom, security, or prosperity, they are merely thoughtless expressions of the oppressive power of governments.
Everyone I’ve heard from the UK, including young people, will weight themselves in “stone”, which is something we don’t have in the US. And it’s always “stone”, never “stones” plural, even though folks generally weigh more than one.
A lot of people outside the US don’t realize that the metric system is not only allowed in the US, it is widely used. Just look at the packaging in any grocery store. It’s a good way to measure very small things. Pharmaceuticals, for instance, are much easier to measure in milligrams rather than grains or something. Use of metric is optional, but very few companies use it broadly, although Coca-cola changed the packaging of soda pop years ago to the now ubiquitous 2L bottle.
I really thought that when Obama took power in 2009 with a democratic congress, he would fundamentally transform us by imposing the metric system. I’m glad they never thought of that. It would’ve done a lot (more) long term damage to our culture.
I was an automobile mechanic in the mid 1970’s working on mostly American cars as I worked my way through college. We usually had 4 mechanics in the shop. We all had our own SAE tools and shared a metric set for the occasional job. Then at some point along the way after I had moved on, car manufacturers decided to use a mix of metric and SAE fasteners on cars and the necessary tool inventory pretty much doubled. I graduated from college and moved on before making the investment which was then made over time for my car hobby.
Thanks, Davey. Great post. Reminded me of the old SNL skit on “the Decibet.”
I absolutely resist metrification, and I get a lot of flack for it because as a scientist/engineer it is considered verboten not to use the MKS or CGS system.
But here’s the thing: in the “olde” units, the sizes represent convenient round numbers for everyday measurements, in many cases single digits, such as a foot tall, a yard of cloth, a gallon of milk, and yes, a pint of beer.
This is true in machining also. For many years, a mil (0.001″) was considered good because that’s what the machines were capable of doing. Later, the desired standard was a tenth mil (0.0001″), which is very awkward to use in metric (“Gee, we need to accomplish another 0.00254 millimeter on this lathe…”). The real-world capability of a machine often doesn’t lend itself to single-digit metric reference, for instance one micron is exceedingly difficult, and one millimeter is trivially easy.
And there’s the problem of an infrastructure with supply chains filled with manufacturers of, e.g., 4×8-foot panels of plywood, fiberboard, wallboard, oriented strand board, so forth and so on ad nauseum. These are cleanly and easily subdivided into 1’x1′, 1’x2′, 1’x4′, and 2’x4′ panels that tile together cleanly. Are we really going to try to describe a project in terms of 1.219 meter by 2.438 meter chunks?
How about cooking? Recipes are given in terms of cups, teaspoons, and tablespoons. These do not translate to cubic centimeters and liters very well at all.
Forced metrification is simply a totalitarian impulse to control, with little or no regard as to how it impacts an entire economic system.
Don’t forget “Score” I love that number! (must be from my D&D days) 🙂
Score is still alive and well especially when referring to money, as is Pony (£25), Monkey (£500) and Ton (£100), although these are (mostly London) slang terms.
Also, hands everyone on BW.Com that played D&D (puts up hand). 🙂
I have to admit I’m missing something here. A score is twenty of something, yes? “Four score and seven years ago” == 87 years.
*keeps hand down*