LOL!!
Isn’t metric a hoot?!?!
I got ‘metricified’ in the ’78 – ’80 period – but it wasn’t the sole measurement system for us to use. By that token, my youngest sister’s education (she’s 5 years younger) was strictly metric. Strangely enough, I had friends in college who had no idea what an inch was. That of course created havoc with copyfitting… points, pics, ciceros, agates etc are all based on imperil measure. And to confuse matters I had to go and memorize the decimal equivalents to all the standard fractions of an inch.
The fun begins when you take a stroll around town… the gas (petrol) station sells by the Litre, but you can go to the butcher and purchase your meat by the Ounce, Pound, Gram, Kilo or slice. We walk into the pub and order ‘pints’ (real 20 oz – unless you order Guiness – then you get the half-Litre pour) but now some dollar-hungry wise-acre has come up with the idea of selling 16 oz pints (sacrilege!). But then the old-timer can still wander in and order a Quart (bottle) of his favourite bevie – but thats not how much he gets. Oh, and Metric does NOT change the size of a dozen.
The paper sizes I specify for print jobs are all standardized to the Imperial system, as are the building supplies for my renovation projects – 2x4s and 2x6s (inches) with sheets of 4×8 drywall (feet). Speeds and distances are all in Kms, but ‘our’ football field is still marked in Yards – and the cars’ speedometers carry both.
The Liquor store sells our booze in bottles marked in mLs, but they’re still 26 and 40 oz bottles to most of us (but we call them ‘pounders’) and no one seems to know what the exact metric measure is – we just buy it based on the size of the bottle.
This is a metric nation??… oh well, it doesn’t bother me much – just don’t ask my parents what they think of it all (or the war, or other languages, or anything thats not meat and potato)….
Cheers (20 oz)… JJ
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