"ARW" wrote in message
...
Obviously never heard of the word imperial before and was amazed at the
markings on the tool that he had never noticed.

I can understand it. Modern engineering uses metric for all official
measurements (as opposed to "folk units" such as "oh, about 4 foot eight and
a half"). I'm 55 years old - old enough to have grown up with imperial as
folk units and to estimate in those units. But young enough that if I have
to measure anything with a ruler or scales, I always use millimetres or
grammes (and being British rather than American, I spell the latter
"gramme", not "gram", but that's another story!).

Nowadays I'd expect tools, plumbing pipes, drills etc to be sold in metric
sizes - or else to have fairly clear wording that they were imperial, for
use with existing legacy installations.

This only applies to the UK; the USA clings to the imperial system like grim
death, even sometimes in scientific and engineering fields. I've seen
scientific papers which use units such as slugs and poundals.

I'm probably weird that I know my height in feet and inches but not in
centimetres, but if I had to measure my height I'd always do so in
centimetres. Younger people probably have less "feel" for measurements in
feet and inches; in a few more generations the imperial system may have been
forgotten about, which is a shame because it has served us well, even if
numerically it is a crap system because no two units for the same physical
quantity are related by the only base that is meaningful to us - base 10,
because we have 10 fingers (inc thumbs) and 10 toes - so calculation is
tedious. Would you prefer to add up a column of prices in £p or in £sd, with
all the latter's carry-after-you-reach-12 and carry-after-you-reach-20
complications.