Linked by Thom Holwerda on Sun 3rd Mar 2013 13:48 UTC
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Problem is the US. This makes it harder to see. Also, a lot of idiomatic phrases make it seem more used, e.g. "Give 'em an inch and they'll take a mile!" Plus also, we still measure distance in Miles and drink Pints of lager, so travelling around the UK will make it seem more extreme than it really is. If the government made a real effort, we could be completely Metric in 10 - 15 years. It wouldn't take all that much.





Member since:
2006-05-30
No, because any book produced since the late 70's has either both Metric and Imperial, or just Metric. As a test, I just looked at 4 or 5 cookery books in the Kitchen. All of them give the Metric first, 2 out of the five don't give the Imperial at all. All canned/bagged/bottled products only give metric (and many are designed to be "European" with the ingredients/contents written in a number of languages.) The only products we tend to get Imperial style units on now are designed for the US market as well (and their weights and measures are similarly named, but not exactly the same on all counts!)
I guess it's kind of like Switzerland speaking 4 different languages, etc. In the UK we have 3 Celtic languages (Welsh, Irish in parts of Northern Ireland and Gaelic in Scotland, and well, one more if you count revived Cornish) as well as English, but they are very specific to regions. But England is very monolingual. We don't really understand how speaking so many regional languages works.
Railways had long fixed that for the UK.
Decimalisation was quite hard enough to bring to the UK. LOL!