This Side of the Pond

When I moved to America, it was fortunate for all involved that I didn’t need to learn a language in order to get by. Speaking in anything other than English has never been my forte, so I was relieved to know that, aside from when our versions of the mother tongue diverge, I would be mostly comprehensible to friends on either side of the seas.

But English wasn’t the only language on the table, as it turned out. It was just the most obvious form of communication. There are other ways to frame data and not all of them constitute a shared language.

Take how we measure things. It wasn’t long before I realized how lucky I am that Britain still uses both the imperial and metric systems, because that means I grew up knowing how to switch between the two.

I have a friend who harbors an incomprehensible hatred of the metric system. Periodically, she will send me photos and comments she believes establish proof that my country is evil for attempting to impose it on everyone else.

I’m not sure what it was that sparked her ire, particularly because it’s actually France’s fault the metric system got invented, not mine. She believes anyone who suggests she might want to multiply and divide by ten (rather than by whatever arbitrary number the imperial system has come up with) is trying to harm her.

The imperial system, on the other hand, is definitely my fault. Much like daylight savings are said to have come about because of one guy who wanted more time to watch butterflies, the imperial system can be attributed to a single group of people: apothecaries.

You might think the metric system was invented to replace the clunky math of ounces and inches, but it was in use well before the Brits formalized our current standards of confusion. The French took their revolution as an opportunity to reform not just how their country was governed, but also how they went about counting things.

A gentleman by the name of Charles Maurice de Talleyrand had a dream that a new natural and standardized system would be embraced worldwide and made this proposal to the French National Assembly in 1790. He had obviously never been introduced to my friend.

Great Britain also turned up its nose when asked to participate in development, so the French went about it alone. This is probably why the meter was originally defined as one ten millionth of the distance between the North Pole and Equator through Paris – if we’d been less sniffy, it might have been London instead.

To me, this makes a lot more sense than saying, for example, that a gallon should be, “equal in volume to ten pounds avoirdupois of distilled water weighed at 62 °F with the barometer at 30 inches.” This is the definition given by the Encyclopedia Britannica, which also points out that the system was based on far older measurements that included a “rod”, which was defined as the length of the left feet of 16 men lined up heel to toe as they emerged from church.

The imperial system was put into law in 1824. At the same time, you guys were busily adopting units based on the ones we’d just gotten rid of, which is why British and American units are different.

In the UK, we theoretically switched over to the metric system in the 1980s, but that hasn’t quite happened in practice. Today, you’ll find milk and beer sold by the pint and soda by the milliliter. Recipes will give you either ounces or grams depending on the author’s mood and gas is sold by the liter.

This has made a lot of Brits relatively bilingual in terms of measurement, which has come in handy. On the other hand, it does mean we have blind spots.

For example, I can only tell you my own height in feet and inches – I haven’t a clue how many centimeters there are between my toes and forehead. I also have no ability to visualize a kilometer because the Brits still measure our roads in miles.

How I determine the size of something is more arbitrary than I realized before my friend’s latest assault caused me to do some soul-searching. I think of noodles and candy bars in terms of grams, but clothing and the size of my television screen are in inches, horses are hands, the size of my home is square feet and potatoes come in pounds.

My fortunate bilingualism also applies to the weather. In the UK, we mostly talk about temperature in terms of Celsius, whereas you guys much prefer Fahrenheit. I have a theoretical understanding of both, which means I know you’re telling me it’s cold whether you say it’s 36 degrees Celsius or 97 degrees Fahrenheit, but I can’t translate between the two – that’s more math than my brain can handle.

But don’t get me started on calendar dates, because those drive me up the wall. In the UK, we decided the rest of Europe had a point when it started ordering the date as day, month and then year. This, after all, is a logical sequence of ascending order.

The US, on the other hand, is still using the month-first format that was sometimes used in the UK until the early 20th century. I still have to take a minute to mentally swap numbers in my head so I apologize in advance if you schedule an appointment with me on the 12th but I don’t turn up until December.

You don’t really think about measurements as a form of communication until you can’t tell how big or long something is because everyone else is describing it differently. I’m relieved to know I can speak your language when it comes to length and weight, but I still come down on the side of the much simpler metric system. Just please don’t tell my friend I said that in case she decides to chase me down the street with a yardstick.