Cups persist, but without much standardisation - you generally have to measure if you care to know which 'cup' size you bought. It won't often matter that much, but as I said it's intellectually annoying isn't it?

Being British I don't encounter them much, just American recipes, but I generally just mentally convert as ¼l (i.e. as though a metric cup, if anyone used that) if I'm following one.

This is not true. There is the US cup, which is 1/16th of a gallon, and then there's the general notion of a "cup" which is the crap that comes with a rice cooker or whatever.

e.g. US gallon != Imperial gallon.

The problem with stuff like cups, gallons, feet, etc. is that they don't travel.

They might kind of work in the US (and long as you're not using an appliance) but they don't work consistently anywhere else.

Which is why they're not used anywhere else. Problem solved.

We live in the age of the World Wide Web and information in ambiguous units is shared everywhere simultaneously all the time.

For example gallon are still used informally in other countries than the US.

People, particularly older people, still talk about "miles per gallon" in the UK. That's Imperial gallons not US gallons. They base their feel for that volume on that.

Same with US vs Imperial pints.

Now product information on UK Amazon isn't always rewritten specifically for the UK. Often they just reuse the blurb from US Amazon without correcting the spelling or grammar to save money.

I own an old Jetboil stove I bought well before Brexit. The inside is marked in "cups".

Any guesses if those are Imperial cups, US cups or Metric cups. I mean I bought it in the UK so they should be Metric cups but Jetboil is a US company so...who knows.

This might not be a problem for you personally but it's definitely still a problem.

They come from a time where the common measurement tool was a balance scale for weight or two vessels of the same volume and any base unit was seemingly arbitrary. There was no understanding of universal constants yet. They're still useful when you have no reference other than the quantity indicated on the label of a package and the ability to measure equal parts.

1 rice cup produces 1 cup of rice when cooked

It's like if I invent an 'air fryer' as though that's something new, and then talk about an '18" oven tray' which is actually 6" wide, but in my air fryer line that's the measurement of what we call '18" oven tray'. Who's winning what? How is this good for anyone?

Please note the adjectives:

> While a standard U.S. cup measure is 240 milliliters, a rice cup according to rice industry standards is much smaller at 180 milliliters.

If you use cups to measure coffee, fine (I don't measure, but I think grams would be more normal) - or if your specific 'coffee maker' came with a cup, fine, but don't over-generalise?

I mean not even over-generalise - GP told me my 'coffee maker' came with a non-standard cup; I promise you it came with no cups whatsoever. (It's a Rancilio Silvia, the stock basket has a max capacity of probably 18? 21? grams - definitely less than any 'cup', about a tablespoon. But that's a physical maximum and nobody called it a cup or suggested it was for measurement.)

The point is that no one really uses those as measurements, they're not useful. But almost every coffee maker comes labeled with cups anyway for some reason, probably marketing for comparison shoppers. Obviously you're right that espresso machines don't have cup markings (however that would even work), but I have to say this is the first time I've seen someone call an espresso machine a coffee maker (hence my uh... curt previous response, sorry about that).

I've never heard an espresso machine called a coffee maker either, but I've never heard the latter term at all, hence this whole thread. Sounds like a refusal to call someone (i.e. a person, not machine) a 'barista' to me.

Mr Coffee carafe markings is 5oz per cup. This is not an espresso machine that makes "small" cups. This is a good old fashioned American pot of coffee and I can tell you what they call a FIVE cup coffee maker makes an actual 2 cups of coffee.

公合(gōnggê) can be used to be specific here.

Will vary depending on the type of rice, but in general, rice expands much more than that when cooked. Somewhere around 2-3X the uncooked volume.

I still enjoy the reactions (of surprise, disappointment, and sometimes mild derision) when I tell people I prefer to cook my rice in a microwave.

Nevertheless, the idea of a standard fixed-volume measure of rice, by the volume it occupies after cooking, seems a poor concept to me, because the factor by which rice grows when cooked varies by breed/variety, level of processing, even soak time. That's why, I was told, the mutthi and nazar system is better.

It makes sense because 1 rice cup is the right amount of uncooked rice to make a decent serving for 1 person. A metric cup is too much!

...which is either a lot of confusion, 1000kg of confusion, 2000lb of confusion, 2240lb of confusion, 2400lb of confusion, 1 giga calorie of confusion, 7 giga calories of confusion, 10 giga calories of confusion, 12,000 btu/h of confusion, or 100, 10000, or 100000 unitless amounts of confusion.

In metric we use the word tonne to disambiguate from the myriad weird, whacky, and deprecated tons used by ~ 5% of the population.

Admittedly megagram is a better word, as it's not overloaded.

Yes, that was pretty much the crux of my point. If you did use that spelling, you wouldn't have to disambiguate, and it'd align with popular English-speaking nations that already use metric.

It's a bit like not using the word 'metre' - despite the USA recalcitrantly eschewing the actual measurement - and confusingly re-purposing 'meter' (a device for measuring something).

I mean, sure, they sound the same (refer sibling comment and response) but context can inform in spoken English.

In written English it's dreadfully convenient to have unique strings for unique concepts (or words).

Consider the down votes US Customary Up-Votes.

Frankly, the -er is better based on actual English pronunciation rules. The -re ending comes from French and is less compatible with how most of the rest of English is pronounced.

And I can't say I've ever been confused by these two different meanings of the word. Can you even come up with an example sentence illustrating ambiguity here?

So, is 'er' better in terms of pronunciation? Perhaps, though I don't think that matters much, as pronunciation varies so wildly based on country, region, education, etc, plus there's so much inconsistency with spelling -> pronunciation within English that I think it's fair to say that ship has long since sailed.

In terms of writing however there's a huge advantage to having words with different meanings have different spellings. I assume I don't have to pitch that idea terribly hard?

For us non-Americans I suspect the frustration boils down to having a recalcitrant nation stubbornly refusing to join the rest of the metric world while simultaneously poisoning the language well of metric unit names everyone else is already using.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metre_(poetry)

If there's anyone responsible for English words having way too many meanings, it ain't Americans.

I'm not suggesting English is a perfect representation of thoughts & concepts into strings of letters & punctuation, or that any one variant has tweaked it to be just right.

I'm complaining that the Rest Of The World has to contend with the dilution of metric terminology (by the regrettable rise of f.e. 'metric ton') that's being perpetrated by a nation state that doesn't even use metric.

Though I think American English tends to pronounce 'ton' as 'tun', would that be right, or are there significant regional accent variations?

Anyway, refer sibling comments on common usage and cultural defaults - and I'll re-emphasize that it works really well for written communication. Like this.

It's extremely rare (don't think I've ever heard it) - except maybe in some industries still, I don't know - but there's an interesting history of advocacy/use of saying 'ton-E' or 'tunnie', to disambiguate the same way AmE pronounces it 'metric ton'.

I've never heard it pronounced as a two-syllable word in the UK, but I confess to only very occasionally travelling north of Luton.

I don't think it was ever common parlance, just important to disambiguate in some industries. Similarly I think 'thou' (-sandth of an inch) is preferred over 'mil' since that's such a common abbreviation of 'millimetre' (which =39thou, so you want to get that right).

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34891145

taun

I suspect you'd find it's common in most English-speaking non-USA metric-embracing nation states.

It works fine spoken, too, because we could say 'imperial ton' or 'american ton' if we ever needed to refer to a specific, archaic, mostly abandoned unit of weight - which is, rounded down, effectively never.

FWIW we're taught to pronounce the word somewhere between 'ton' and 'tone', but, really, the context here is that all tonnes (or phonetic equivalent) are metric once you're outside the USA.

Re-purposing words - even 'only works in writing' (like we're using to communicate here) words - seems whatever the opposite of 'luxuriating in the massive potential breadth of language' might be called.

Specifically 'metric ton' I expect would be mildly offensive to everyone that uses metric, and doesn't want to disambiguate the pre-existing, and clearly more widely prevailing homophone of 'tonne'.

Even more confusingly, this originates from a Chinese unit which was standardized differently in modern China.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ge_(unit)