In what county do meters still look like that though? I see them here in the US, but back in my metric home country they certainly don’t look like iron age torture devices anymore.
In most cases, the American spelling of English words compared to the rest-of-the-world spelling is pretty much a wash. A matter of personal preference.
But “metre” is a hill I will die on. “Metre” and “meter” mean different things, and by spelling them both “meter”, as the Americans do, you’re just making communication worse.
It is not. “Gasoline” is what Brits should call the substance they put into their vehicles. Petroleum is not what goes in them, that is just an unrefined version of gasoline.
I find this one funny, and it’s a great response to the above. Petroleum is an unrefined product. It makes no sense for the Brits to call gasoline by that name.
Here’s my hill to die on: If two words are pronounced the same way, thay should be spelled the same was. That whole -re/-er and -le/-el this is needlessly confusing
The thing is, while “meter” and “metre” are pronounced the same, when you use them in compound words they’re not. Thermometer or odometer are pronounced with stress on the second syllable (the syllable immediately prior to “meter”), but kilometre and centimetre are pronounced with the stress on the third syllable (“MEtre”).
It’s really easy to learn the size of your body. My span is around than 20 cm. 5 of them is 1 meter. the width of my pinky is 1 cm. You can learn how to step 1m distance, for me it’s a bit longer than a normal step. I can measure with my body between 1cm and several meters. So it’s really easy to overcome this small limitation of the metric system.
It’s as easy as getting comfortable with the usual measures of your body. I also know how much is a kilogram because I can lift a big water bottle which also is a liter. Really, the way all of the units are built more or less around water can give you a pretty accurate instinct.
My feet are certainly not a feet long. More like 25 cm or so. But as another commenter already said, I can measure ~175 cm using my arm's reach easily, matchboxes are standardised as 5 cm long, the width of my palm is about 8 cm, distance from my fingertips to my elbow is around 50 cm and the distance from ground to approx. my navel is 1 meter.
Plenty of ways to get an approximate metric measurements without a ruler or measuring tape.
And it's much easier to convert from cm or mm to m (or vice versa) than to convert between ft and inch or ft and 1/8 of an inch or whatever weird measuring standards the US-ians use.
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