I’ve spent five and a half years of my life living in countries that use the metric system, which isn’t such a remarkable accomplishment when you consider that the United States is the only country left in the world that doesn’t. I have a lot of strong opinions about why I find our continued use of the imperial system to be absurd, but that’s for another post.
Learning a system of measurement, like learning a foreign language, occurs in stages. First, of course, there’s the learning process- for example, that an inch is comprised of 2.54 centimeters. This stage is straightforward and even most Americans I’d guess are at least familiar with how to do basic conversions between the imperial and metric systems.
When I moved to Italy and then China, I was still in the “conversion” stage. When someone said, “Oh, it’s 34 degrees today”, I mentally converted this figure to a more familiar 95 degrees Fahrenheit. When people said “meters”, I converted to feet. And so on.
Then comes a second stage, in which you no longer need to convert but have in fact internalized both systems. For example, when someone says meters I can visualize the distance, and when someone says feet I feel equally comfortable.
The third stage, of course, is when you become so familiar with a new system that you’re forced to convert back to the old one. For an American, this would mean that when someone says “feet”, you have to think in meters and translate back.
In my experience, these stages describe my use of different types of measurements; in other words, my assimilation of different aspects of the metric system occurred at different speeds. Some, in fact, haven’t occurred yet at all.
For height and weight, I’m still in the primary stage. I know what 5 ft. 10 “looks like”, and when someone says they’re 176 centimeters tall, I mentally calculate that figure back into feet and inches. Ditto with weight; I still think in pounds rather than kilograms or the ludicrous Anglo “stones”.
For distance, I’m in the secondary stage. When I’m cycling, I know all to well what “20 kilometers left” means. Yet when people say, “San Francisco is about 400 miles north of Los Angeles”, I don’t need to convert that into km.
In temperature I’m firmly in the third stage. Perhaps this is because I have a little Firefox widget in the bottom right corner of the screen telling me what Kunming’s temperature in centigrade is each day (22 degrees and sunny today, for those who want to know). Perhaps because every time I listen to the radio in China (usually in cabs) I take in a weather report. Perhaps because for some reason I’ve always been curious about the weather. Who knows?
I’ve lost the ability to conceptualize Fahrenheit. This occasionally results in a situation in which I’m talking to another American who mentions, “Oh, in Vietnam it was really hot- about 90 degrees” and I have to pretend I know exactly what that means. Whenever I go home, I change the temperature gauge in the car to Centigrade. This makes me highly suspect I realize, but being from San Francisco I’m no longer fazed by accusations of unpatriotism.
Go metric!
Comments 4
“Go metric!”
Amen! It’s long since time you Yanks caught up with the rest of the world. Shit, even the Poms have managed to metricate.
What’s funny, though, is just how many generations it takes to get imperial out of the system. I’m sure you’re reasonably familiar with traditional Chinese measurements and can match them- at least with as much difficulty as I can (and it takes me some mental gymnastics)- with their metric equivalents. Same thing for NZ. We metricated in the 60s, but even in the 80s my mum would send me down to the dairy (corner store/convenience store) for a pound of butter, and I’d run off and buy 500 grams of butter. Or a pint of milk which was actually a 600 ml bottle. And my height and weight were metric at school and imperial (British style- we use stones, and our gallons are different) at home. I don’t know about Kiwi kids these days, but certainly my generation is equally conversant in both (but with differences among individuals- I much prefer metric, but others my age may be more comfortable with imperial, but nevertheless, we communicate).
And to this day the weight of newborn babies in NZ is given in both kgs and pounds/ounces.
But somehow temperature is the big non-converter. Even my grandparents would always talk celsius/centigrade. The few occasions I lived in a flat equipped with a 60s-era oven that still had the temperature marked in fahrenheit, it took several failed attempts at baking or roasting followed by a desperate dig through cookbooks to find a conversion scale before anybody could use the bloody thing.
Oh, and although America tries to pretend otherwise, there’s a difference between metre and meter. Metre is the basic unit of length, meter is an instrument used to measure. A micrometre is one millionth of a metre; a micrometer is an instrument used to measure lengths on roughly that scale, just as a voltmeter measures voltage.
Posted 13 Feb 2009 at 5:13 pm ¶You forget the grand nation of Liberia, which to this day also uses the imperial system!
Posted 24 Feb 2009 at 7:02 pm ¶Liberia? Really? Still, they have been rather busy with other things these last few years. Can’t really blame them for not finding the time to update their measurements.
Oh, and a new colleague, an American, told me a few days ago that America is officially metric, the conversion happened back in the 60s or 70s, but nobody paid any attention to the new law and just kept using imperial. Don’t know how much truth there is to that, but it was interesting to hear.
Posted 25 Feb 2009 at 7:05 pm ¶I was born in 1957, which means I attended school starting in 1962. I remember being in grade school ((1962-68) and being told we were switching to the metric system, I’m guessing about 1966. We had a special teacher come to our classroom for a little while everyday. I felt like we were being re-programed, because we had already been taught the IMPERIAL SYSTEM (I didn’t even know it was called that) but I liked it! All of a sudden it stopped! We didn’t learn anything, it hadn’t been long enough. I remember my mother saying that THEY decided not to switch to the metric system.
Posted 07 Jul 2009 at 12:00 pm ¶To be honest most Americans only use the metric system when someone needs a 2 liter bottle of pop picked up from the store. Isn’t that sad!
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