Considering I respect Orwell's insights about lot of things this passage is especially dim:

"There is, for instance, effectively no unit between the metre, which is more than a yard, and the centimetre, which is less than half an inch"

Between the metre (100 centimetres) and the centimetre there is the "ten centimetres" - which we use extensively.

Human hand is pretty good even in metric system. My thumb is 2 cm wide, and if I extend my hand the distance between the tops of my thumb and pinky is roughly 20 cm.

The 10cm unit actually even has a name - a decimetre :)

Yes, but that's not what we use in vernacular (in finnish, that is) :)

The imperial system is better positioned for those who are not exposed to maths. These systems developed before literacy and don't require literacy for its fundamentals.

Of course it's a moot point these days, but this is why it's a more humanist system of weights and measures.

The imperial system gives you more humanist whole units. Inches, yards, furlongs, miles, leagues, not to mention the less usual (today) digit, finger, palm, barleycorn, etc. Pounds, stone, hundredweight, woolsack, tonne, etc.

It's probably a matter of familiarity rather than of humanity. I fail to see how numerically illiterate would fair better using rulers with imperial units rather than metric ones.

True but it's familiarity with oneself, one's own human dimensions.

I can see where the writer of that article is coming from, having been born in 1950, Canada would've started its "metrification" in his/her 20s. Arguably a very late time to switch your mode of thought from imperial to metric.

However, the key point Orwell makes: "But I have never heard a Frenchman say, ‘He is a hundred and forty-two centimetres high’" is, quite simply, false. To my Dutch ears, hearing about a 1.42m high man does bring up a vivid image of a very short person who'd have problems grabbing anything from a kitchen counter. Thus, it seems more like a legacy problem, rather than the imperial system being intrinsically more relatable than the metric system.

A better test would be to see how long it would take someone who is unfamiliar with either systems, to pick up either. Does it take kids longer to learn metric than imperial? I doubt that..

I'm French but I can make the conversions of feet, pounds etc in my head quite easily (divide by 3 and 2 respectively to get a good enough approximation). But I'm at loss with Fahrenheit though.

The point is not really about the difficulty of conversion, but about having to do it at all. Whether hearing about a 1.42m high man brings up a vivid image immediately, or only after conversion to imperial measures. Not unlike how becoming fluent in a given second language means there are no longer any intermediates. Rather than having to think consciously of a certain sentence in your own native language and then converting that consciously to a sentence in the given second language, you can just immediately think of the sentence in the given second language.

This happens gradually of course, there are a few length measurements in feet & inches that immediately give me a clear/rich image of the intended length: 6 feet, my own height in feet/inches, etc. However, the set of imperial length measures for which this happens is much, much smaller than that for metric length measures. For instance, I have absolutely no clue how long a yard is, let alone a hundred yards, and how that relates to a mile. Only after conversion, and doing the conversion enough times, will it become clear(er) to me.

He might have a point with other units, but when it comes to temperature, Celsius strikes me as more humanistic and intuitive. Zero as the freezing point of water, and 100 as the boiling point is easy for any human to relate to since we interact with water every day.

Fahrenheit originally had the freezing point of water at 30 degrees, and body temperature at 90 degrees (can't get much more humanistic than that :-)).

Then he fudged the scale to 32 and 96, so there would be 64 intervals between the two. Probably no one here needs to have it explained why 64 equal intervals was a convenient number for the task of marking the thermometer (compass and straight edge would be enough).

Unfortunately it turned out that his number for the average body temperature was a little bit off. So it goes...

Fahrenheit is fairly humanistic as well: 0 is very roughly as cold as you'll ever see, and 100 is about as hot as you'll ever see.

I'm not generally interested in the temperature when it is 'normal'. However when it is unusually hot or cold I might check.

That may be true where you live. Try explaining it to somebody from Kuwait or Yakutsk, though.

0 is about as cold as you'll ever see? Except in half of the world?

One the one hand, yes, (freezing and boiling) but on the other hand, 1 degree C is not always fine enough to describe a temperature. I know, one could use fractions.

Basically, the jump from 37C to 38C is noticeable, whereas something similar like a jump from 98F to 99F, feels more graduated.

Owell's complaint that it's hard to estimate sizes in cm is debatable.

As a tourist in Europe, I had plenty of people quote cm for various things that I would measure in feet and inches. It didn't seem hard for them.

His argument around literary value is interesting. There are many languages which may be superior in those respects.

English excels at being precise and scientific.

What feels right is mostly determined by what you grew up with. I grew up with the metric system, and imperial is basically meaningless to me, and I know people the other way round.

Of course. We can all get used to whatever measures one has to use in daily life. Still, I think because many of the imperial units did actually come from human physical bases, they are intrinsically humanistic, whereas the metric system simply took arbitrary measures and divided and multiplied in powers of ten --leaving very large gaps.

Kind of the same thing in architecture, when they talk about human scale vs more modernist epic architecture which lacks human scale (Brasilia, for example)

There are no gaps between metric measures, especially not "very large" ones. It happens that people used to the metric system take full advantage of it by using decimals, whereas people raised using the imperial system don't. In the metric system you have much bigger units than with imperial, much smaller too and all the needed ones in between.

A good example is height. It is much more precise and easy to use the metric system to say I'm 1'87 meters than saying 5 feet 11 inches, which mixes units. If you want to be more precise you could say 1'871 in metric and 5 feet 11 inches and something like "a sixteenth of an inch" (sorry I'm not being accurate, I didn't even look up). Or human weight? Don't get me started with stone and pounds. A stone is something more than 6kg and a pound is about 400g or 0'4kg. Good luck with that.

The imperial system might have an aura of romanticism for those of you raised on countries that still use it, but the metric system is one of the most elegant solutions civilisation has invented. It works in every case better than any other system and it is easy to teach to kids. 10/10 would measure again ;)

I guess, after all there's a reason the international science community adopted the metric system.

> I guess, after all there's a reason the international science community adopted the metric system.

There are a few big exceptions - physics with eV, astronomy with just about a whole new imperial system, warts and all, and the most brazen is chemists who've managed to squeeze the mole in to the SI system despite its being entirely redundant and depending on two (2!) different mass units - the kg and the amu. So I'd say some big subgroups of the science community really haven't adopted the metric system.

1.87m is around 6ft2, actually :) I see that imperial units are still used because for many people it is too late to change (or they are just too stubborn). Teaching imperial units to kids, though, should be considered a crime.

> Teaching imperial units to kids, though, should be considered a crime.

THIS. as for curiosity, why not, but we can say something similar about nordic runes or egyptian writings. But this is more of an ego challenge, when one should accept that what they grown up with is inferior (sorry to our english-native friends, but imperial system is really, really archaic & inferior).

And yes, we in europe regularly measure in metres+centimetres, we use decimetres quite regularly, and it feels natural having bigger part divided into 10 or 100, or 1000 subparts. On the other hand, feets are nightmare (30,5cm), and 6"2 - what the heck is that 2? is it 2/10 of the foot? or 2 inches which are TOTALLY different measure compared to feet without any easy translation? mess...

Bah. first off you write it as 6'2" 6 ft, 2 inches. when you're doing practical applications of this, running around with your tape measure and cutting wood to fit, you dont' want to start mixing in percentages. It gets more comfortable the more you use a tape measure because you're not using tenths. You're using quarters, eighths and 16ths. Need more precise? Haha, I don't want to say because it's vulgar but fits well on a job site.

It may seem like an extra pain in the neck but I think it just has to do with a personal aesthetic scale, one that can grow on you quickly.

I like to divide and multiply by 2 and 3 and 4, it keeps the numbers around me simple and. And doing that with inches, you have 12, 24, 48. Other things scale-wise to people ends up being kind of nice.

Door widths at 30" Sheets of plywood and drywall at 4'x 8'. Heavy to handle but cover a lot of area. These template defaults just kind of become aesthetically pleasing to work with after I'd say a short time, one can appreciate the units of measurements and how we manufacture to suit them and ourselves best.

I had an old Triumph Which some genius had been maintaining in metric. All the exhaust was metric, the rest imperial. Whatever your hatred level of imperial is, a blend of both systems is worse.

Imperial units should be continued to be taught in English class as an interesting and archaic linguistic quirk that you need to be aware of as it will show up in a lot of older writings.

> English excels at being precise and scientific.

That's false. Today English is the biggest language in terms of dictionary weight. English is the universal language, borrows terminology from other languages and modern sciences, which grow exponentially, use primarily English. Especially computer science.

That said, English tends to be less precise and hence less complex compared to other languages. For example 'love' vs 'in love' are used interchangeably and their meaning is not as precise as in other languages. Greek has totally different words to convey the meaning 'ΑΓΑΠΗ' (love) vs 'ΕΡΩΤΑΣ' (in love). Italian like English uses 'innamorato' vs 'amore', which again blurs the difference between the two.

Greek and Russian I believe are way more precise as languages than English will ever be. That's not to that a language is superior or inferior than the other. It's a matter of language design, I guess. I don't know about Japanese, Chinese, African and Arabic languages/dialects.

Bulgarian for example is a rather modern language, derives from Cyrillic and is grammatically very simple. Much simpler than Russian. But it's a complete language by all means.

Crap, I'm not a linguist. I was just trying to find some redeeming feature of the language ;)

Now, since I assume we both support metric, we have to partner to change the default language of the world.