I think there was some sort of annoucement this week about Imperial measures by the UK government as one of them so-called ‘Brexit benefits’ and there has been the usual fuss on Social Media. ‘Brexit benefits’ like blue passports or crown symbols on pint glasses, changes that have zero effect on the economy or our everyday lives. They further stoke the division between the hard right empire nostalgia Nationalists and the younger generation scorning another weird set of odd peculiarities of the white old Gammons. The really bizarre bit of all this is that all these things could have been done whilst the UK was an EU member, the UK simply chose not to, they are not Brexit benefits at all, but things the UK could have done anyway without leaving the Single Market.
Yet, in a way it isn’t in this case. I am actually an advocate of Imperial Measurements, I grew up with them, I still cook using Imperial Measures and still think in Imperial in domestic matters. However I can quite see the point that Imperial isn’t of any use until that is you learn it and I understand why it is lumped in with criticism of blue passports, crown symbols, deporting black people, or whatever it is these right wing nutters actually want.
I was very privileged to have grown up with the Imperial system and also to be taught the Metric system at school (albeit using old Maths books written in Imperial) and we had a mathematician as Headmaster who thought it useful for us to learn maths using different base systems and so not restricted in our thinking to only using base 10. I’m a dual system perosn. To me the two systems are just that, two different systems. One works better for some things and vice versa. My generation learned both well, as we had to convert everything back into Imperial for when we talked with our uncles and nans.
The issue really comes down to trade, trade requires regulation, for both parties to accept a common weights and measures system, so traded goods can be verified to be the length or weight that the seller claims tham to be. The Metric system works really well for this as it is really easy as everything can be split into thousands, hundreds and tens. It is used in Science as science looks at tiny picolitre samples and then oceans at the ecosystem scale. The Metric system is great for this, no conversions are necessary.
However, once a product reaches a shop and an individual consumer wants to buy a piece of say, cheese, it becomes clumsy. One gram of cheese is a tiny mouthful and a kilogram is a huge piece of cheese, neither useful quantities for buying cheese for a family, pounds and ounces come into their own, whether you buy 6 or 7 ounces of cheese makes a difference. one ounce is 28.3495 grams and far too precise for domestic recipes, so you often see 25g or 30g used in recipes, which is a little fussy. In older recipe books you will see things like ‘a good ounce of butter’ or just over an ounce, or measure an ounce but be generous. For baking this makes much more sense, it is numbers at a more human scale.
This is how the Imperial system developed over centuries of human existence, horses height is measured in hands (4″, 4 inches, about 10cm) because a human hand is roughly 4″ wide. This measure is just used for horses. Fathoms measure depth, One fathom is 6′, 6 feet (180cm) because depth was measured by dropping a weighted rope off the side of the boat and rope was gathered by men who when gathering rope around outstreched arms is roughly 6′ or a fathom, so you could guesstimate depth if you didn’t have a specially knotted rope to hand. Basically in imperial you use the measuring system specifically designed for the job you do, you don’t have to learn all the obscure units at once, just the ones you use. A mile (1.6km) is comprised of 1760 yards (the distance you walk in a leisurely 20 minutes) A yard (just under a metre) is comprised of 6 feet (30cm) each made up of 12 inches (2.5cm). “A metre measures 3 foot 3 [inches], it’s longer than a yard you see” I remember hearing older members of my family uttering this under their breaths as they tried to understand Metric labelling!
So if you are looking at small things all you need be concerned with is inches, things in your room, you think about feet, then when you leave the house you start with yards but then move onto miles. You use the scale that fits the job. You never have to think about how much fuel it would take to drive your car across your kitchen. Well you could convert miles per gallon into inches per gallon, but now we’re talking about comparing big things with small things and no longer at a human scale and Metric is so better for that, well provided you are careful to count your zeros carefully.
Dual systems, having a choice of tool is to me a good thing. It’s the same with languages, being able to speak two languages is better than one. I speak Welsh and English and bi-lingual speakers will often say things like ‘Ymddiheuro fydd o’n hawddach i esbonio yn yr Saesneg’ [Apologies it will be easier to explain in English] , and sometimes the other way around. Two systems are better than one, they make life easier, but and it is a big but, if and only if both parties have learned to speak the language of both systems.
However I think almost everyone a few years younger than I will only have been taught the Metric system at school and they live perfectally fine lives with it and are not really prevented from doing anything. The UK government chose amost sole use of the Metric system some generations ago now (although blamed the EC for it at the time), all the EC said was that machines need to display Metric quantities and prices must be displayed in Metric, they never said the UK couldn’t continue to dual system, the UK chose that. It is personally annoying, when I pop into the cheese shop, I still ask for “8oz [ounces] of your lovely Swaledale please” [Swaledale is possibly my favourite cheese] and in recent years younger staff have been clueless “No problem, just over 200 grams” and we’ve been fine. For me I can look at a piece of cheese and see how many ounces it is, I can’t do that with grams, they are not at a human scale.
I don’t know what Boris Johnson’s mad crazy government intends exactly with the Imperial system change. Teaching the system isn’t such a bad idea: Learn that there are more than one way of measuring things, the history of weights and measures (including why we have months and why we find bones marked 30 times, think about it if you don’t know the answer), Doing sums not in base 10 [I suspect not many computer programmers use binary these days, but useful nonetheless]. A couple of fun interesting valuable lessons I would imagine, but please, please not what I had to do at school: Convert the quantities in the textbook into Metric [which was often the hard bit], now do the sum that you’ve been taught how to do today, then to check you’ve done it right, convert the answer back into Imperial, so you can check it against the answers in the back of the book; I think I had a fairly unique experience with maths at school and yes we did wonder if it wouldn’t have just been easier to do the whole sum in Imperial!
Sorry for the rant, I just see so much criticism of the Imperial system by people who don’t understand it or have ever used it. It’s annoying as this is exactly the same argument they often use against the Brexiteers. I also get criticism of the Welsh language from monoglot English speakers who don’t understand the advantages of speaking two languages. Basically I just despise people expressing strong opinions on things people don’t understand. It is perhaps the disease of the 21st century.