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Why do people who try to convince others to switch to metric focus so much on the conversions?
(herbicide.fallcounty.omg.lol)
this post was submitted on 30 Jan 2026
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I'm honestly surprised you've never had to do that, because it happens to me all the time.
Like when I'm approaching a junction on the road and the satnav suddenly changes from saying 0.5 miles to like 500 yards, that's jarring and breaks my mental countdown. (In Britain, the roads are imperial, yes it's a pain.)
Or if I'm cooking an old recipe and it needs 12oz of something, but I'm doubling the quantity, suddenly I need to know what that is in lb and oz because my scale doesn't just tell me 24oz.
Or if someone says they're 5' 8" tall, I have to know how many " in a ' to conceptualise how close that is to 6'.
Meanwhile, I know when I'm out hiking what my pacing is for 100m, and if I've got 2.5km to go, that's 25 lots of pacing.
Or when I'm sewing, and fabric is sold by the metre but all the pattern pieces are measured in cm or mm.
And not strictly related, but it's handy being able to measure out water in an unmarked container using a weighing scale and the fact that 1l=1kg.
I think part of it is being used to it (I do just kiiiinda know that 5'8" is 4" shy of 6', but I blame the same nerdiness that lead me to knowing what links, chains, and furlongs even are for that one), and the other part is I use metric in the kitchen, and don't follow recipes directly a lot of the time. I have some master recipes memorized that get used.
My GPS doesn't do a 500ft callout (kinda wish it did), it's usually 200, which my brain translates "Slow down now or you will miss the turn" because the announcement is often a little behind, so it's jarring for other reasons. Also your GPS says yards?? Mine only does feet/miles, and mine's weird and verbally calls out "Five tenths of a mile" when I'm walking to the store.
Yes, the UK uses yards as an intermediate unit between feet and miles, and it's displayed on signs.
Oh, wild. My GPS (I'm in the US) just goes from 1/8 mile to 100 feet. It's kinda rare to hear people talk in yards unless it's a vague "A few yards over", or when it's 1/32~1/16 miles if they need to be accurate here. Anything nearer is feet, anything farther is in eighths, quarters, or half miles.