In article , NY
writes
"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.
I read an article recently arguing that base 12 would be better than 10
because it has more factors.
--
bert