Written 08/25
I think it was in the 1970s when Australia became metric, and everything became metric. There was no wishy washiness of showing the old and the new. No, this is metric, this is how it is. You learn it, and we did, because we had to. For some, no doubt they had to make mental conversions, but younger people such as I was, quickly picked up the new system.
A bad moment for me was when we were driving in England, looking for a turn off I saw a sign with the name and 200 yards ahead. I know a yard is a bit less than a metre, but my brain would not instantly calculate the distance to being not very far ahead. England is half metricated.
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Still think in inches and feet . Kilos and dollars are fine
ReplyDeleteYou are bi then.
DeleteI am ok with us Aussies being metric, but what confuses me is the UK seem to be a mixture of metric and imperial. Someone recently was talking about weight and used the term stones; I had to translate that to kilos
ReplyDeleteJ, I really wish the UK would use kilometres rather than miles etc. I used to know my weight in stones, 8.5 to 9 comes to mind, and my mother still used stones and pounds when describing her weight, which no doubt meant medical staff pulled out their phones to convert.
DeleteI am currently 11 stone (70kg) down from 13, and aiming for 9.5 (60kg)
DeleteEven though we in Canada 🇨🇦 use the metric system, I am 69 years old and still have difficulty with it. It is not what I grew up with and I still use pounds and ounces.
ReplyDeleteDon't get me wrong, I am not totally in the dark about it, it is just easier and faster for me to stick with the old method.
Linda, I am 68 and maybe Australia changed earlier, and I never learnt imperial very well. I generally know lengths but not weights or much else.
Deleteone kilo is 2.2 pounds if that helps.
DeleteRiver, rather interesting that people are returning to state babies weight in pounds now.
DeleteBring back the rods, poles, perches, chain, oz, lb (US or Imperial?), acres etc! Do you mean I learnt all that stuff in about year 4 or 5 at school all for nothing?
ReplyDeleteAh yes, MC. We can return to calling Dandenong Road the Great Three Chain Dandenong Road. It was probably in my old blog when I wrote about the mystery of why a 44 gallon drum became a 205 litre drum.
DeleteI remember being taught about the decimal system in school and people complainig about the government rippig off bank accounts etc because a shilling (12 pence) was now 10 cents and they'd all lost 2 pennies per coin. Ditto ten shillings (120 pennies) was now one dollar (100 pennies/cents) so 20 pennies were lost. I also remember women complaining about the weight of things in kilos and grams and how would they know what size can of soup to buy, to which I said "If you always bought the size that fits tyour hand, then keep buying that size can" which made perfect sense to me. This was all a few years before I started working, when I had no money of my own to be worrying about.
ReplyDeleteRiver, my grandmother complained about the loss of value in the money. Some shops did take advantage of the change and cheated customers. Your soup can is a good comparison.
DeleteThis can be confusing and challenging. Here it's metres and centigrade. And something unique is we don't have million here. That's ten lakhs. And 10 million is one crore. Now thanks to American influence, million is quite frequently seen and used.
ReplyDeletePradeep, sometimes when I ask my tenants questions about India, they give me a figure in lakhs, but then convert it in their head to AU$. They also know inches more than centimetres, which surprised me.
DeleteUK is still confusingly Imperial and metric. Even young children will still say that their fathers are six feet tall.
ReplyDeleteYep JB. I am just under six foot, and I know that.
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