I just overheard...

nanna8

Not in Victoria- no miles here or for many years now.Always kilometres. I haven’t heard of miles here anywhere I’ve been but maybe over West there might be.

Oops, the USA, apologies.
How could I get mixed up

Anyway, it always seems to be in hours in Australia!

Good one .

Not in Victoria- no miles here or for many years now.Always kilometres. I haven’t heard of miles here anywhere I’ve been but maybe over West there might be.

biglouis 🤔 isn’t ten minus three, seven?

Australia still uses miles, though

Or, when talking distances, hours. 😀

The only thing I still think of in Pounds and Ounces is the weight of a new born baby and with the height of a person I still like 5 foot, 6 foot etc. - centimetres don’t cut it, for some reason.The old imperial system is hardly used here at all now and the young ones look at me funny when I say our newest g grandson was 7 lbs. 4 Oz.

Certainly things like screws and washers etc are in all sorts of sizes in both metric and imperial as we still have so many items in our homes that were put in in imperial measurement times. I actually had a three way swop to work out when this country went metric. I went to live abroad and coming back on leave was converting the decimal into escudos and back to £sd to work out what the cost meant!! I can use either or both of course but at my age of course think of my height and weight etc in imperial and dont really visualize sizes in metric . I still have the two sets of weights for my baking and like using them both. The food turns out ok and I still have some very old family recipes and handwritten ones from my mother and granny that oare in imperial and especially the smaller ingredients are easier just to use the old weights. They still taste just as delicious!

I can manage transferring metric to inches in my head, but weight in kilos still defeats me.

I have found it very useful to be able to use both Imperial and metric systems. It keeps the brain agile.

State schools might well not be teaching independent thought and the the ability to adapt and learn now, but they may well be teaching there are 67 genders to a person. A great use of taxpayers’ money and a huge benefit to society as that is.

When I was 14 I got a job in a chip shop. The first thing I learned was how to remember orders and give the correct change. There were a (very) few dishonest customers who would come in straight from the pub all gobby. They would try to challenge a young person by saying that they gave me a pound note when they had, in fact, tendered ten shillings.

I quickly leanred to recognise these types. When they handed over payment I would always call out what they had given me and then smooth it out on the tyop of the counter. Then I would recite "You gave me ten shillings, your fish and chips comes to three shillings, so that makes four shillings change". Then I would count it out on top of the counter in front of the whole shop. The one time a man claimed to have given me a pound note the women next in the queue called our "No you didnt luv, you gave her ten shillings." In Liverpool women could be as brash and loudmouthed as their men.

I buy on cones too, and often hold yarns together to increase their weight, or Navajo ply them as I knit to treble the thickness. If you haven’t tried that before it’s a great way to adapt your stash, and it’s easy. There will be a YouTube video but it’s basically a series of slip knots.

Annoyingly, the jumper I’m working on now will have a lot left over. I bought the right amount according to the pattern but I reckon there will be four or five balls left when it’s done. It came on skeins, and I wound all of them when I had my swift out, so I can’t return them. They are 50g each, so if I’m right there will be 200-250g. It was £8.99 a ball, so it represents a chunk of money, too.

I understand now Doodledog thanks for explaining. My own yarn is generally bought by the kilo or 25 grams (for example some Rowan fine tweed) but I buy a lot of remaindered yarn that will be irregular weights. I do have some older cotton that is 100g and just noticed some silk noil that's 50g though - so probably have more similar in my "assorted" boxes.

I wasn't trying to be awkward- I assumed lots of yarn came in 25g.

Most of mine is on cones though now - even the silks/cashmere etc. I suppose it's a long time since I bought balls in any quantity as I'm not really a knitter so it's usually for some specific details. I'm obviously out of touch!

It's not weight lbs/kilos I keep comparing, its inches and cms. I still have to convert cms to inches to visualise the measure.

NotSpaghetti

Doodledog - if you want a small quantity of yarn, surely 25g is smaller than the ounce balls of yesterday?

Why do you think that
Buying in ounces will have been cheaper?

I explained that, I think. If I buy 100g skeins or balls and only use a few yards of the last one, I might have 90g wastage, which is over 3oz. If I buy in ounces the most I will waste is a fraction of an ounce, so it’s cheaper to do it that way.

25g balls are rare, these days, and usually are very fine cashmere or similar, unless they are ‘mini-skeins’ sold in packs or kits to make fair isle or other colour work items.

Barmeyoldbat oh bless…..just bless!

Paucity of language I’m afraid.
Many only read for information nowadays and the tendency is for instructions to be in very literal or sometimes child like terms, meaning some descriptive none precise words like “tepid” don’t get a look in.
A young women (not a kid) at work had no idea what the colour “mauve” was, she’d never heard of it🤗

Dear VanadianGran How many 16 years olds do you know that buy sliced ham in a deli ? They buy crap in McDonalds or Subway and steal ham out of the fridge.

I suppose we could look upon this dilemma in the same way that we do now regarding Latin. It is no longer used by GPS to write notes and prescriptions, or by Catholic priests saying mass.
Imperial weights and measures will probably become of historical interest only within my lifetime.
Which in itself is quite ludicrous when you consider that we were being told at school that metric was “where it was at” in primary school in 1969
At the same time as getting used to the new shiny decimal coinage, while still using the old.
An old sixpence was equal to two and a half new pence etc etc.
We haven’t exactly rushed into this metric malarkey have we?😀

Doodledog - if you want a small quantity of yarn, surely 25g is smaller than the ounce balls of yesterday?

Why do you think that
Buying in ounces will have been cheaper?

A young person, 19 or so, was buying the ingredients for some recipe and asked me where he could find tepid water.

I think US "imperial" is not exactly the same as UK ""imperial" biglouis but I think Canada uses - at least largely, UK imperial (when not using metric).

I know from living in the US and being familiar with lbs and oz as well as metric that i found it very confusing. A (liquid) gallon is quite a lot smaller than here in the UK and the UK pint contains 20 of our fluid oz (roughly 28½ml each). The American pint only has
16 US fluid oz but they are 29½ml (or so) each.

Cups are fine if you stick to the actual measuring cups that match your recipe but it's a bit of a minefield if you use cookbooks/recipes from other countries which is what I like to do. So much easier if everything is in ml/l and grams/kgs I think.

Cup sizes are different too of course. A cup of flour (whichever country you are in), even if your cup size matches the country of origin of your recipe, will be different every time you fill it. But 250 grams of flour will always be 250g.

A couple of years ago, we were in Sainsbury’s at the fresh meat counter. The assistant brought out a large piece of fillet steak and we asked for 2/3 of it. He said, “you’ll have to show me how much that is. “. We were both flabbergasted!

I can't visualise any weights and measures in metric except, funnily enough, kilometres.

The oddest thing though is when you want to buy wood, it's sold in metres but tends to still be 2X4, 4X4 etc. in inches.

I used to have regular debates with my late father, who was born in 1940, about this very subject. I said that, just as we went decimal in one fell swoop in 1971, we should have done the same with metric measurements. He disagreed, as was his right, but I still feel this way. I was just six and in my second year of school when we went decimal - it is the first major news item l remember - and learned metric measurements at school except for subjects like cookery where imperial measurements were king. Gradually more and more things have changed to metric in my lifetime. After all, who thinks of gallons of petrol now? I make a point of baking using metric weights. We have gradually been making the move towards metric for most of my life and I am now 58. Why it was not done all at once decades ago remains a mystery to me. If this had happened, no-one would bat an eyelid now. By the way, who on earth thinks in Fahrenheit now? Celsius is the only way anyone under around 65 learned about temperature.

Oh I’m with you HelloGirl11 sooo much better. I still have to double check when the only option is in metric, garment sizes especially even after years of decimalisation I just can’t get on with it. Imperial is our tradition, our roots, our history, nay of our culture. Excuse me now while I stand back in preparation of those who will declare me the Evil One.

grandtanteJE65

You really cannot blame a young person for being confused about imperial measures and how they compare to the metric system. After all, I am 71 and had left school at 15 before the change came in in Britain.

Denmark went over to the metric system some time in the end the 19th century - only historians learn the old measurements and weights (if they need to), school-children do not and haven't done so for over a century.

But my generation and my mother's and grandmother's still talk or talked about buying a pound of something - which is more than an Imperial pound if you really want to know, and my husband's generation of joiners and carpenters continued to use inches when ordering wood from the wood-yard.

Finally nearly 200 hundred years after the change the generations that are younger then we, have no idea what we are talking about if we say, "I bought a pound and a half of mince," or "I shall need a dozen four by twos for the job." and this is really how it should be.

The young woman mentioned in OPs post should however have known that kgs stands for kilo or kilograms, but is justified in asking whether that is the same as a pound.

I took my maths O level in Imperial measurements. In 1968/70 I had to learn both systems for my maths A levels, the first years that this had happened.
For most of Britain the currency and general measurements didn't go metric until 1971.
I did find it very confusing. However I now weigh things, both myself and ingredients, in metric though all my scales can be used for both systems.
I actually only know my babies weights in imperial, and this still seems to be what people understand. Everyone seems to measure their height in feet and inches though!