Discussion»Questions»History» Americans still practice ancient methods of weighing stuff in pounds & ounces. What other ancient practices are still in vogue in the USA?
I've heard that said before, but don't agree. I believe we speak English - with a different accent and dialect. (Dialect: a particular form of a language which is peculiar to a specific region or social group.)
If that's not true - then you must define which region in England is speaking English. Because all the other dialects and accents are separate languages, themselves.
The British at least spell it correctly. Americanese bears the same relationship to English as Afrikaans does to Dutch. Most of the words are similar but the pronunciation is completely different and the spelling has also diverged.
American scientists and engineers do use the Metric, or more precisely the Systeme Internationale, units and scales. NASA Flight Controllers' running commentaries now quote altitudes in metres. (That is the correct spelling by the way - it is a French word.)
If you own an imported vehicle, you will know it is built to metric standards and you need metric-sized spanners to service it.
The USA is also a Full Member of the International Standards Organisation which has ratified the SI as the only legal international one for science, engineering and commerce; and is now almost the only nation world-wide still using Imperial units (and ancient versions of some of them, at that) for everyday trade.
The UK officially "went metric" decades ago, but with a very small number of allowed exceptions. Notably these include the Statute Mile and Yard for road distances (mile/hour for speeds) though vehicle fuel is sold in litres; and the Pint / half-Pint for dispensing cask and keg beers and ciders. Bottled drinks and dispensed spirits are sold in litre divisions. I was surprised to discover not long ago that our railways still measure distances and curve radii in Miles, Yards and Chains, too.
I don't really follow competitive sports but there was a strange item in a news programme on the radio a couple of weeks ago about some cricket outfit - I didn't catch what - who want to change the game's established technical terms like "wickets" to American baseball ones! ("Outs", I think, in that example.) God know why. Just to sound American, I suppose.
' I think the USA tried going metric, didn't it? A few years ago now I was a regular on Wikipedia's Answers site - not a chat-room like Answermug, but a classified Q & A service. Its "Maths" section included a huge number of questions from who I think were American school-children wanting Answers users to do their homework for them, and a very large proportion was on Imperial / Metric conversions.
Since converting from a given value in one system to its equivalent in the other entails no more than multiplying it by a constant readily available in any number of books and web-sites, it's hard to see why it so baffled them, and I began to wonder if they were being taught it properly.
What was very regrettable though was a couple of other users who loved making the subject as hard as possible. They would turn answering "How many km equal 40 miles" or "What is 10kg in lbs?" into a morass of intermediate steps (sometimes as far as breaking road distances down to inches and cms), and try to refer to Algebra and Dimensional Analysis. The former is not necessary and the latter, totally wrong because these are not "dimensional analysis" questions. This duo sometimes became so tangled they made mistakes in their own arithmetic!
(The answers? 40 miles X 8/5 = 64 km, and 10kg X 2.2 = 22lbs, both accurately enough for most purposes in daily life. )
One oddity in the way Britain went metric is that our schools teach the metre, kilometre and centimetre... yet the last is not the recognised division in SI, and is rarely used in science and engineering. It should be the millimetre as the SI scales are in +3 and -3 powers of 10. Having worked in companies in both technical fields, I find the cm rather confusing, and if someone quotes a cm measurement to me, I have to convert it mentally to mm before I can judge the size in question. Sometimes by then thinking the inch-approximation, like 100mm is roughly 4 inches: old habits die hard! X
Slartibartfast 