General Chat

Now that the metric system is in wide use all over the world, I can see why Americans have not adopted it:

A miss is as good s 1.6 kilometers. Put your best .3 of a meter forward. Spare the 5.03 meters and spoil the child. Twenty-eight grams of prevention is worth 453 grams of cure. Give a man 2.5 centimeters and he'll take 1.6 kilometers. Peter Piper picked 8.8 liters of pickled peppers. It's just not got the same ring to it!

right on Anna, I still call a foot a foot what will be a 6 furlong horse race be called? we still have one of our monetary values left its the guinea, horses are bought and sold in guineas.

I was just having a chuckle to myself about the time I drove to Roehampton with a set of Venetian Blinds in the back of my car, only to find on my arrival at the job that the customer had measured in cm and passed it on as mm. The things were only a tenth of the right size. I personally can estimate an inch, a foot or a yard, and want a 6ft length of 4X2, not the odd sizes which prevail today.

I once went into a hardware shop and wanted a six foot length of timber. 'Sorry', said the assistant, it's metric now. 'OK', I replied, 'I'll have a two metre length' Out came the timber. 'How much' I asked. 'Right', that's six and a half feet at 80p per foot'. Doh !

Please, Don,t let America go metric. My weight sounds bad enough in pounds without having to almost double it in kilowatsits. Lol

I hate cooking with metric measurements. I always found it much easier to scale up or down the amounts given in recipes when I was dealing with 2 or 4 oz instead of hundreds of grammes. It's odd - I can't get on with litres & cubic centimetres either, but I'm OK with money and linear measurements. Or maybe it's just me that's odd! CB >|<

Louise, I left school in 1968 and I still can,t get my head around all this metric stuff when I come home to England. I still ask for things in pounds when I visit the local shops. Lol

French bycycle frames are still measured in inches (pouces) as are TV screens and compressor fittings. And in the markets you can still buy a pound (livre, half a kilo) of vegetables and a bottle of wine is 75cl in UK it is 750ml. Recipes use cl rather than ml. And the US pint is only four fifths of a pint and their gallon is only four fifths of a gallon. D

Dave, Our gallons and miles might be less than the imperial measures but i would rather have 4/5ths of a gallon than a litre. Lol Fred, Apologies accepted ( I think). Lol

I am very pleased to say we use Imperial measures here....and only imperial measures! The only time is when we buy something that has come from UK or Europe and the size could be marked in Metric....which makes it very confusing when you want !/2 pipe fittings!!!! Jacquie xxxxx

An American gallon is 4.05 litres, a British gallon is 4.55 litres, IIRC.

A pint of water weighs a pound and a quarter, an american one weighs a pound. (20 fluid oz or 16) Some of our shops sell milk in pints, (although they put the litre equivalent first, eg.: 2.72 litres, 4 pints, [that's 2 quarts, half a gallon, 8o fl oz] some in litres. What annoys me is the equivalent prices that tesco give. £2.99 75 ml bottles of wine, £2.99 per 75 ml, etc. Others`give so much per litre. Delicatesan gives the price as so much per 100g. In France every thing including equivalent prices as so much per kilo or per litre. I think Tesco are doing their best to confuse us. D