There was nothing disparaging about the comment. There is also nothing anti-intellectual about comparing things you don't know to things you do, in order to contextualize information. And he did that by first converting to mm, so did not abandon SI measurements at all. I agree that when we are talking about more common measurements it can be gratuitous or grandstanding, much like talking about things over 1x size in percent, as e.g. 450% bigger, etc. But that is not the case here.