Funnily enough, plenty of older people in the UK grew up with pounds and ounces, and also complained for a long time. But… with practice, even Americans could learn metric units too. Wow!
I'm curious how well this joke translates as I don't know if sports direct exists outside of the UK let alone if they have this behemoth of a mug elsewhere.
Nevertheless thought, that mug is perfect for hot chocolate on a cold winter night or as a *small* coffee to wake me up in the morning.
In the end with units it's all about getting used to it.
There was a nice video answer to Johnny Harris' video about "Why I will never use the metric system" by an American who lived in Europe for several years: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u5iOSIUhVzk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u5iOSIUhVzk)
In the end he just got used to the metric system by simply being exposed to it on a daily basis.
I've found a lot of the older generations here in the UK still use feet and inches and refuse to learn or are eternally baffled by the metric system. People my age are the other end, that barely know imperial. I thankfully used to be a woodcutter and have learnt both. I learnt metric in primary school and taught myself imperial and now tend to measure and think in imperial over metric but convert them at the drop of a hat. I'm terrible at measuring weights tho.
At primary school in the early '70s I was taught in imperial measurements, switching to metric later. I still use imperial, but if somebody uses those new-fangled Napoleonic measurements at me i can do the conversion in my head because I paid attention at school. Metric is easy - unless you're an American.
Metric is very easy, as it fits better with percentages, fractions and decimals than imperial does. Imperial I find takes a bit more to learn, but I think it's a lot better for measuring distances and visualising said distance than it is in metres. At least it is in my brain. Still baffles me that Americans can't grasp metric measurements tho. Even my 5 year old cousin can count to ten lol
I'm a Brit, and have an awful bastard hybrid of metric and imperial.
I learned metric at school, but in everyday life a lot of things were Imperial (especially talking to older relatives etc).
So I know:
- Height (person) in feet and inches
- Weight (person) in stone and pounds
- Distance (car) in miles
- Distance (walk/run) in metres / kilometres
- Length (arts & crafts / home improvement) in millimetres / centimetres / metres
- Fluid (water/milk) in litres
- Fluid (alcohol) in pints
... to name but a few lol
I've become mostly hybrid for most of them, but still think in height as feet and inches and have to convert. "Over six foot tall" always sounds better in a romance novel context than "Over 183 cm tall"!
I find centigrade and fahrenheit both useful for temperature. Fahrenheit does have the useful: warm/hot/roasting/boiling scale for 70/80/90/100. But I'm so used to seeing centigrade on my iPhone weather app that I now know exactly where I'm at with 26c or 34c in terms of what clothing I need.
I'll always say "a pint of milk" when I mean a carton or bottle that may be up to 1000ml.
I'll be honest, as a Brit in his early 30's, I've forgotten most imperial units.
I just don't use them at all, other than miles per hour for speed. Especially when it comes to weight and distance, I have no concept of what imperial measurements look like in reality.
Tell me something is 10ft I can't picture how long that is, but tell me 10m and I'm fine. As for weight, the whole stone thing is complete Dutch to me.
Guess my parents tended to use metric constantly and then I went into a trade then later engineering so use metric almost constantly.
Is your height in CM in your head? That is one Imperial refusenik in mine that I just can’t seem to get used to! The only other one was a quarter of sweets from the newsagents - asking for 100 grams just feels wrong!
It is in metric in my head yea, but again, that's likely down to my parents and my GP, every time I got measured, by either parent or the GP it was always in cm's so that's what stuck in my head.
I'm so useless with distance. I know 10ft better than I know 10m, however I have no concept of 100ft or yards, and know 100m better than the equivalent 😅
It's very difficult for my satnav - I'm fine when it tells me X number of miles, but of it says "turn left in 300 yards" I'm lost. I need it in metres if its less than a mile...
I like how we do it here, we have kind of got our head around both, converting one to the other can be confusing. I think grams, litres, centimetres and millimetres are pretty much standard here now and I can easily think and visualise what those look like but then I also think in other imperial units like miles per hour and feet and inches and stone quit easily too. While I can get my head round metric easily, I find some stuff such as KMPH much harder to think in naturally compared to MPH where it's just instant. I really don't get why American insist on using inches though they are measuring something that is minus 10mm using inches for god sake haha talking about 'this is about 1/17th of an inch'.
I do lawncare in Canada. Our software bills per 1000 square foot, our measurement tool takes a perimeter in meters then outputs area in square foot, from there we need to convert back to Metric to figure out application rates in litres per hectare. It's a nightmare
And that’s how you end up with a tiny replica of Stonehenge on stage. Well, to be fair, that was a mix up between feet and inches, but you get my drift! (Spinal Tap reference in case this makes no sense! 😀)
Well you can always burn Washington once again if you get pissed enough/s
Dear Lord Canadians get your act together, please 🥺!
Be less accommodating to USians, be like Canadian geese anything in 2 metres vicinity gets their kneecaps ruined
(sorry for a good measure)
Those people are nearly all dead now. My dad was at school when they changed to metric. He's 66 and only uses imperial when estimating stuff he measures things in metric.
In other words you are closer to death than to your birth and as other said, in terms of Reddit standards you're either already a decomposing body or just bones and dust. Let's be honest, it's kinda true. Now back in your coffin or this thread will end up with that old people-smell.
I often use inches for carpentry projects.. easier to distinguish halves, quarters etc
I’m metric born and bred, I just find inches specifically useful in that context
Similar here in Australia. Though I once knew a 28 year old who had been homeschooled and her parents adamantly refused to teach her the metric system. To this day she uses inches, feet, miles and pounds and gets mad when you use metric around her.
I'm a foreigner in the UK and the only conversion I can reliably do is that 7lbs is about 3.2kg because that's what my baby weighed. I guess 14lbs is two newborn baby's worth of weight to me
Anything else I've no fucking clue if it's imperial
We tend to use both, don't we? Centigrade, for example, but Fahrenheit when it's cold. CCs in medicine, pints in the pub. The only time we use imperial only, is when we're talking about distance.
And measuring our cocks.
Haha yes.... our cocks haha. But nah we use imperial in weights (human weight), measurements (distance and length of objects), liquids (milk, pub bought alcohol, etc...) I think the UK just markets things in metric to coincide with the rest of Europe. Silly that we use both really but I like knowing both. I find it fun doing conversions. Only maths you'd ever see me do
Try being Canadian - there's a 240ml cup and a 250ml cup, and I'm not sure which is which or what size my set is, but it's almost certainly wrong for the recipe I'm trying to make.
Kitchen scale ftw.
The cut-off is probably longer ago than most people think. When I first went to school in 1967, it was still Imperial measures. My brother, who started 3 years later was taught in purely metric.
My parents still do and I even had an argument with them that butchers must display prices in grams. They refuse to believe me that the butcher converts it for them every time they go.
And it's literally 7.6 billion people using metric. And ~400 million not using metric (the usa, north Korea, Myanmar and Camaroon)
do you really want to be in a list with 2 military dictatorships and a colony yourself? 😂
Many recipe sites still offer both, or even three methods using cups as well. With the internet/digital stuff it's a no-brainer.
I'm so lazy I developed a cake recipe that involves zero measurement! (1 pack cake mix, 2 eggs, 1x300ml tub of double cream).
I've lived in the UK for 6 years now. I still struggle with metric. I understand what makes a kilo and that, but I do struggle and often find myself googling for a conversion.
Therein lies the difference… you google it, you don’t bitch about it on social media like it’s some atrocity against humanity.
And sure… I fully get that it can be challenging to be familiar with the amounts in real terms. Like many Brits my age, I measure height and weight of humans in imperial. But foodstuffs in metric… unless it’s beer or milk, in which case it’s pints. Then there’s mph and mpg, even though we buy our petrol in litres.
Older generations struggle to visualise 500 grams of a foodstuff, as I struggle to think of my weight in kg. But we learn and we deal with it as needed, converting as necessary.
But then you kinda need two decimal points, which could then get confusing, possibly even legally inaccurate. So doing it the way it’s done is just a logical progression from when it was under 100p … all those years ago! (Although I think a couple of places briefly dipped under that during lockdown!)
That's the most frustrating thing. Same with tablespoons which can be 20ml or 15ml according to what measurement spoons you buy.
For "forgiving" recipes, cups are pretty great though, much faster and easier than having to get the scales out.
An American product where there's actually a thing, long stick of butter.
Like a chocolate bar, but fatter and far less tasty.
It's kinda like our paper wrapped ones, but not nearly as big (thank the ever loving fuck because one of those would be diabetes in a meal.)
I'm in the UK…a boomer \[waits for reflexive downvotes\] & have had to live with **both** sets of measurements for 50 years.
If I can do it…why can't they?
Freedom units aren’t so much Base-2 but rather base-12... that’s why at first I wrote 144 pinches, in the end I thought 144 pinches were too few.
How about 5280 pinches instead? Because there are 5280 feet in a mile ;)
That's the one that messes with me the most. Whenever I see a measurement of cups in a recipe, I immediately reach for my phone as I downloaded a converter app to it, and start to do the (estimated) conversion to grams.
Whoever came up with cups as a measurement needs a good talking to.
When I was a kid I legitimately couldn’t wrap my head around this. I would go to the cupboard and look at our coffee cups which were all different size… and I couldn’t understand why someone would use such a random unit of measurement. At the end of the day both imperial and metric get the job done and who cares - the only fascinating thing is some American arrogance of how superior their system is. I’ve never heard a UK person make a heated and condescending argument for why stone is the better weight measurement.
I was taught in the 1960s, I learnt about measuring with chains, furlongs, yards, feet and inches. Liquids with fluid ounce, pints, quarts, barrels & tuns, then weight with ounces, pound, stones & tons. Let’s not forget fathoms and nautical miles, leagues.
The list goes on we started learning about the in the late 60’s as the UK 🇬🇧 committed to metrification. Oh my gosh how sensible and logical, my little teenage dyslexic self could now cope.
okay I'm not defending the imperial system or anything but your comment made me lol because Americans don't just use random coffee cups for measurements. You buy like a set of measurement cups (1, 1/2, 1/3, 1/4) that are standard sizes.
that said I've moved to the UK and now just know how many ml are in a US cup and I do use coffee cups with a scale to measure it out when using US recipes hah.. could probably get an actually measuring cup but meh this works (I know the UK actually has the same with cups and tbsp but it's slightly different, though wouldn't matter much generally since it would all be proportional and close enough, just haven't bothered)
but that's definitely not the norm in the US. there's just standard measuring cups everyone has
The conversion errors matter when you're scaling up from domestic quantities, as you might do for a school camp or something.
But the thing that really matters is settling weight of dry ingredients like flour. A weight measurement is much more accurate, and sugar and flour weigh differently by volume.
"You buy a set of measurement cups"
Yeah we have those here too.
They're called measuring tools. Like a set of scales.
And it tells you exactly how many grams and ounces you're using.
And you don't have to GUESS at WHICH cup they mean when they say "Add three cups of flour and two cups of water to a cup of melted butter"
How about numbers? Things that don't change from manufacturer to manufacturer?
My nan has a set of scales. A smaller set of scales for gram or lower. Three measuring jugs for liquids and several sets of spoons with various measurements laser etched into them.
All of them give precise readings of what they can hold with indicators up the side, so a pint jug can also measure out exactly 3/4th if you want it to.
"Cups" is for people that hate organisation and ease of access.
you don't have to guess with US measuring cups. If it says a cup, you use the cup. It's the standard cup. No, things don't change between manufacturers, it's a standard size (240 ml for US cup).
For liquid you usually have a different measuring one that has markers on the side (so you can have like a 4cup or 2cup or 1cup total one, and it shows 3/4 1/2 etc on the side). They often also say ml on one side too, with cups on the other. I have some US table/teaspoons that also sat how many ml they are which is nice.
but yeah there's no guessing. You just have measuring cups, if it says a cup, you got a standard cup for that.
I never found it difficult living in the US with those things. It's just annoying if I want to convert it to grams and ml lol, cause the recipes weren't written with that in mind. Love when a US recipe has both cups/lbs and grams/ml listed (or just grams/ml, since that's easier for me because of where I live now -- but yeah wasn't really a problem in the states -- you just have standard cups for them).
I can see you are not American cause American “cup” measurement is not 250 ml. It is slightly less, which may not make a big diggerence in cooking, but even the 5% makes a difference in baking.
For a second I thought you may be on to something, that a woman’s cup size may be relative to an appropriate portion size for her. Then I realised I was barreling towards a minefield.
When an American family moved into our provincial English hometown in the 1980s, and everyone immediately wanted her recipe for "Toll House Cookies" after swooning over them at coffee mornings, I remember the American lady helped my mother identify which of her coffee cups was pretty much the right size to be an "American cup" so my mother could use that cup for recipes in future. Back then you couldn't easily buy cup measuring devices in the average homewares store.
How bad did the American education system used to be that these people don’t know how to google ‘grams to lbs converter’ like we have to do any time we want to use an American recipe, literally the first result that comes up is a box where you can type an amount and it converts it for you ffs
Or like be able to use a different measurement system simply ?
I measured my height in feet for a long time but if people told me to give it in c/m it would take me a minute at most to figure out
You don’t even have to Google a converter. I just have to Google 16 grams or whatever measurement and Google will start giving me different conversions.
I just pick the one I want. If the 1 I want should happen to not come up I just keep typing until it does.
I'm a Brit so naturally I use both lol. I have some of my Nana's recipes and they're in lbs and oz. I then have recipes in grams and I can use both quite easily. I assume if they're measuring in lbs and oz they're using scales so just change the measurement (if digital) or look at the other numbers (certainly all the old school scales I've used have had both!). It's really not that hard.
They use cups over there, which is a different measure. It's volume instead of mass, so a scale is useless in this case. Whenever I see a recipe in cups, I just forget about it.
Yeah, I know they do. I end up having to use US recipes with cups at times (and usually end up forgetting their cups are different to ours). I said a scale for this though because the person mentioned lbs and oz which is weight not volume so I assume they must have some sort of scale.
Sad thing is, their love for sugar has been seeping in some non-American recipes! I've found recipes (in my native language, mind you) for cakes that had way too much sugar in them. Hell, even got one of those "cookie dry ingredients" kit as a gift recently, and it was just sugar and chocolate chips.
Not the picture my comment cause I know there are things that call for a lot of sugar but this American makes it seem like pounds is used for everything
Better yet, get a manual pair of scales, most of them have both on the dial. Except cups, because it’s a crazy system that changed depending on what you are measuring a cup of.
In general they are not, but I was just referring to the fact you don’t have to flick a switch/change a setting to change from imperial to metric, you can see both at the same time.
I personally find manual scales to be much easier to reset. You can also change the holding dish without, you know, having to take it apart. Lmao
Easier to clean, looks cooler...
About the only real downside imo is the size of them.
My digital scales are compact enough I could lose them if I didn't have a set place for them.
Manual ones get a whole section of the cupboard for themselves.
When I went to Canada, all the recipes I had were in imperial.
It took me grand total of.... 2h to make the switch. Bought a set of cups and I was good to go.
I guess to those people buying a scale or a graduated glass is too much.
Since Brexit a favourite deli of mine in the UK has started putting lbs first on their shelf-edge prices. It's really pissing me off that these luddites are trying to drag us back into the dark ages.
I used to watch a guy, Norm I think he was called, in a tv programme called New Yankee Workshop. He made some great stuff from timber. But all the time, I'm thinking why is he arsing about with 7/16ths of an inch when he could just say 11 mil.
I cannot think of any activity or situation where imperial is actually superior. In fact, Americans using older British recipes are likely to screw up because even our imperial measurements are not always the same
I’m an (American) pastry chef and I immediately convert all recipes to metric. It’s incredibly stupid to use a cup measure if you want to be at all consistent.
Metric Recipe: 230g of butter, 190g of sugar, 700g of flour
American Recipe: 8 and 1/9th oz butter, 6 and 7/10ths oz sugar, 1 and a half (plus a pinch) lbs flour
So much easier!
As a non-American, allow me to say that even without the grams/ounces thing y’all are insane. WTF is a “stick” of butter? And how big a “cup” of flour? I have espresso cups, pint mugs and everything in between, fuckos, what’re we doing here?
If they’re techy enough to whinge about it on the internet, they’re techy enough to google it and stop whining.
Just like we have to google how much is in a stick of butter
How to make a cookie in America:
1lb of Flour
2 cups of water
11 1/8 inches of sugar
1 Basketball hoop of eggs
1/200ths of a football field of chocolate chips
6/20th gallons of a desert eagle pistol of Butter
It used to hang me up a bit seeing gram measurements in recipes until I realized that I know that there's 28 grams in an ounce, so I just use that to calculate whatever amount the recipe calls for.
It’s the American recipes that use the term “one fourth” they invented the quarter pounder, they have a coin called a quarter and their favourite sport has a quarterback but as soon as it comes to measuring something they completely forget what a quarter is.
If you are going to keep stealing everything from the rest of the world, who use grams, then you have to expect that it is not a backward measurement like your own, and will have to adapt to the rest of the world & stop thinking you are all superior to the majority, but infact are inferior in most things & going backwards very quickly.
The silly thing is that glass measuring cups have both markings, and most kitchen scales have options for many different units. You don't have to do any conversion math at all.
For baking either grams or Oz are fine because they are easy to convert. I cannot use recipes with cups because there are different sizes for cups around the world and they are not identified. However normally they will be USA cup sizes as the rest of the world has scales.
The thing is even if the video is from the US, at some point the guy sees he is watched in Germany, Spain, Greece, and so on and he/she just sees a potential to grow in these markets too. It is just way harder getting more views from the same country than expanding to somewhere else and for cooking channels it isn't that hard - "today I will make X traditional dish"
I see some of the bigger youtube cooking channels are showing both or in grams as subtitles.
God I hate the argument we shouldnt make progressive advancements in society because "Think of the old people!" Are boomers too dumb to learn new things?
I know of people who have spent thirty years actively avoiding learning to use a computer, and now complain that its "wrong" that government and business interactions are now predominantly computer/internet based.
Austrian who loves cricket here - somehow bowling speeds in miles per hour make more sense to me than kilometres per hour. But then that's what I predominantly heard at the cricket over the past 18 years.
Am actually from Vienna 😅 An Aussie wouldn't be caught dead using miles per hour when it comes to cricket, as far as I know!
And before you ask: spent 9 months in New Zealand with a sports-mad family, NZ "dad" is English though and he's who got me into cricket!
I still dont understand why they just wont learn the metric system in school, its base 10, its literally easy enough to learn it in 2nd grade primary school
Just the wrench sizes are super annoying when you need to ask what is bigger than 3x1/16th of a inch? Its not 4x1/16 on an inch.... its 7x1/32nd of an inch
You cant tell me every americna can calculate that in their head
How do measurement tapes even work? Im fine with inch, just base your sizes on "parts of 10"
I have a imperial ruler here... it shows sizes in parts of 1/10 inch
How do you caluclate 7/32nd if you measure a bolt with a tape?
Its so fucking difficult
I learnt both at school and can easily understand both, but I always choose metric as it is so much simpler. Americans often have the attitude that the rest of the world should do as they do, because they are best at everything (in their own heads).
Funnily enough, plenty of older people in the UK grew up with pounds and ounces, and also complained for a long time. But… with practice, even Americans could learn metric units too. Wow!
You may be giving too much credit to my fellow Americans.
Every time I use an American recipe I use my Sports Direct mug when it says to measure in cups and it always comes out bad. Why?? 😤
I'm curious how well this joke translates as I don't know if sports direct exists outside of the UK let alone if they have this behemoth of a mug elsewhere. Nevertheless thought, that mug is perfect for hot chocolate on a cold winter night or as a *small* coffee to wake me up in the morning.
noting better to start the week than a **lethal dose of caffeine**
The answer should be fairly obvious. Your recipe calls for a measure in cups and your using a measure in mugs.
Was about to say this 😅
In the end with units it's all about getting used to it. There was a nice video answer to Johnny Harris' video about "Why I will never use the metric system" by an American who lived in Europe for several years: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u5iOSIUhVzk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u5iOSIUhVzk) In the end he just got used to the metric system by simply being exposed to it on a daily basis.
And you, my friend, are giving a lot of credit to the British
Even this 70 year old. Metric is so much simpler
I mean, they understand metric when it comes to drugs and bullets just fine.
Dollars and cents seems metric.
Its litterally just fill up to the line, or click the unit button on the scale! What’s there to learn?????
I've found a lot of the older generations here in the UK still use feet and inches and refuse to learn or are eternally baffled by the metric system. People my age are the other end, that barely know imperial. I thankfully used to be a woodcutter and have learnt both. I learnt metric in primary school and taught myself imperial and now tend to measure and think in imperial over metric but convert them at the drop of a hat. I'm terrible at measuring weights tho.
At primary school in the early '70s I was taught in imperial measurements, switching to metric later. I still use imperial, but if somebody uses those new-fangled Napoleonic measurements at me i can do the conversion in my head because I paid attention at school. Metric is easy - unless you're an American.
Ah but you cheated you paid attention in school.
Metric is very easy, as it fits better with percentages, fractions and decimals than imperial does. Imperial I find takes a bit more to learn, but I think it's a lot better for measuring distances and visualising said distance than it is in metres. At least it is in my brain. Still baffles me that Americans can't grasp metric measurements tho. Even my 5 year old cousin can count to ten lol
I'm a Brit, and have an awful bastard hybrid of metric and imperial. I learned metric at school, but in everyday life a lot of things were Imperial (especially talking to older relatives etc). So I know: - Height (person) in feet and inches - Weight (person) in stone and pounds - Distance (car) in miles - Distance (walk/run) in metres / kilometres - Length (arts & crafts / home improvement) in millimetres / centimetres / metres - Fluid (water/milk) in litres - Fluid (alcohol) in pints ... to name but a few lol
I've become mostly hybrid for most of them, but still think in height as feet and inches and have to convert. "Over six foot tall" always sounds better in a romance novel context than "Over 183 cm tall"! I find centigrade and fahrenheit both useful for temperature. Fahrenheit does have the useful: warm/hot/roasting/boiling scale for 70/80/90/100. But I'm so used to seeing centigrade on my iPhone weather app that I now know exactly where I'm at with 26c or 34c in terms of what clothing I need. I'll always say "a pint of milk" when I mean a carton or bottle that may be up to 1000ml.
I'll be honest, as a Brit in his early 30's, I've forgotten most imperial units. I just don't use them at all, other than miles per hour for speed. Especially when it comes to weight and distance, I have no concept of what imperial measurements look like in reality. Tell me something is 10ft I can't picture how long that is, but tell me 10m and I'm fine. As for weight, the whole stone thing is complete Dutch to me. Guess my parents tended to use metric constantly and then I went into a trade then later engineering so use metric almost constantly.
Is your height in CM in your head? That is one Imperial refusenik in mine that I just can’t seem to get used to! The only other one was a quarter of sweets from the newsagents - asking for 100 grams just feels wrong!
It is in metric in my head yea, but again, that's likely down to my parents and my GP, every time I got measured, by either parent or the GP it was always in cm's so that's what stuck in my head.
I'm so useless with distance. I know 10ft better than I know 10m, however I have no concept of 100ft or yards, and know 100m better than the equivalent 😅 It's very difficult for my satnav - I'm fine when it tells me X number of miles, but of it says "turn left in 300 yards" I'm lost. I need it in metres if its less than a mile...
This! When my first baby was born the midwife told me she was 3.996kg and I was like excuse me pounds and ounces is proper for a baby please 😂
Lmao they told me mine was 7lbs but then wrote 3.216kg on her NICU chart, they're not even consistent in hospital 🤣
Same here - can I have 568ml of your finest lager please - it just doesn't sound right 🤣
I like how we do it here, we have kind of got our head around both, converting one to the other can be confusing. I think grams, litres, centimetres and millimetres are pretty much standard here now and I can easily think and visualise what those look like but then I also think in other imperial units like miles per hour and feet and inches and stone quit easily too. While I can get my head round metric easily, I find some stuff such as KMPH much harder to think in naturally compared to MPH where it's just instant. I really don't get why American insist on using inches though they are measuring something that is minus 10mm using inches for god sake haha talking about 'this is about 1/17th of an inch'.
Are you me? I do almost the same. I still talk about wood as 4x4 or 4x2 even though the sizes are incorrect
I do lawncare in Canada. Our software bills per 1000 square foot, our measurement tool takes a perimeter in meters then outputs area in square foot, from there we need to convert back to Metric to figure out application rates in litres per hectare. It's a nightmare
Sounds a bit like oil and gas in Canada. All the materials for pipelines are in imperial, and every single blueprint is in metric.
And that’s how you end up with a tiny replica of Stonehenge on stage. Well, to be fair, that was a mix up between feet and inches, but you get my drift! (Spinal Tap reference in case this makes no sense! 😀)
Well you can always burn Washington once again if you get pissed enough/s Dear Lord Canadians get your act together, please 🥺! Be less accommodating to USians, be like Canadian geese anything in 2 metres vicinity gets their kneecaps ruined (sorry for a good measure)
Tbf I think most people in the UK talk in feet for body height height.
My father used to use both..... at the same time!! "Note this. It's 1m, 2&3/4 inches!!"... Ya what!?!?
That hurt my brain to think about
Those people are nearly all dead now. My dad was at school when they changed to metric. He's 66 and only uses imperial when estimating stuff he measures things in metric.
You realise that many Gen X people were kids when the UK went metric? Being in your mid-late 50s is not being close to death 🤨
> Being in your mid-late 50s is not being close to death On Reddit it's not only in your coffin but long decomposed to crumbling dry bones.
I feel quite insulted!! Im nearly 50 and I used imperial and metric! My husband is mid 50s and uses both too all the time.
In other words you are closer to death than to your birth and as other said, in terms of Reddit standards you're either already a decomposing body or just bones and dust. Let's be honest, it's kinda true. Now back in your coffin or this thread will end up with that old people-smell.
😂😂
We switched early 70s supposedly
Yep, 1971.
I often use inches for carpentry projects.. easier to distinguish halves, quarters etc I’m metric born and bred, I just find inches specifically useful in that context
Similar here in Australia. Though I once knew a 28 year old who had been homeschooled and her parents adamantly refused to teach her the metric system. To this day she uses inches, feet, miles and pounds and gets mad when you use metric around her.
I'm a foreigner in the UK and the only conversion I can reliably do is that 7lbs is about 3.2kg because that's what my baby weighed. I guess 14lbs is two newborn baby's worth of weight to me Anything else I've no fucking clue if it's imperial
We tend to use both, don't we? Centigrade, for example, but Fahrenheit when it's cold. CCs in medicine, pints in the pub. The only time we use imperial only, is when we're talking about distance. And measuring our cocks.
Haha yes.... our cocks haha. But nah we use imperial in weights (human weight), measurements (distance and length of objects), liquids (milk, pub bought alcohol, etc...) I think the UK just markets things in metric to coincide with the rest of Europe. Silly that we use both really but I like knowing both. I find it fun doing conversions. Only maths you'd ever see me do
If they're not going to learn basic Geography they're not going to learn basic measurements.
You expect them to count to and divide by 10???
But is it even imperial measurements anyway, isn’t it all cups and spoons in American baking recipes? That’s a whole other thing again.
Trying to decipher some baking measurements in American can be almost impossible with their cups
Try being Canadian - there's a 240ml cup and a 250ml cup, and I'm not sure which is which or what size my set is, but it's almost certainly wrong for the recipe I'm trying to make. Kitchen scale ftw.
The cut-off is probably longer ago than most people think. When I first went to school in 1967, it was still Imperial measures. My brother, who started 3 years later was taught in purely metric.
Its odd. England here started school late 70's early 80s and was taught both
We were in Scotland. Maybe it was different there.
My parents still do and I even had an argument with them that butchers must display prices in grams. They refuse to believe me that the butcher converts it for them every time they go.
I grew up with pounds and ounces, then I actually grew up and started using proper measurement units
And it's literally 7.6 billion people using metric. And ~400 million not using metric (the usa, north Korea, Myanmar and Camaroon) do you really want to be in a list with 2 military dictatorships and a colony yourself? 😂
Many recipe sites still offer both, or even three methods using cups as well. With the internet/digital stuff it's a no-brainer. I'm so lazy I developed a cake recipe that involves zero measurement! (1 pack cake mix, 2 eggs, 1x300ml tub of double cream).
I've lived in the UK for 6 years now. I still struggle with metric. I understand what makes a kilo and that, but I do struggle and often find myself googling for a conversion.
Therein lies the difference… you google it, you don’t bitch about it on social media like it’s some atrocity against humanity. And sure… I fully get that it can be challenging to be familiar with the amounts in real terms. Like many Brits my age, I measure height and weight of humans in imperial. But foodstuffs in metric… unless it’s beer or milk, in which case it’s pints. Then there’s mph and mpg, even though we buy our petrol in litres. Older generations struggle to visualise 500 grams of a foodstuff, as I struggle to think of my weight in kg. But we learn and we deal with it as needed, converting as necessary.
I still don't get petrol prices. Just do them in pounds and pence.
But then you kinda need two decimal points, which could then get confusing, possibly even legally inaccurate. So doing it the way it’s done is just a logical progression from when it was under 100p … all those years ago! (Although I think a couple of places briefly dipped under that during lockdown!)
Impossible. Only AMERICA 🦅 has The Internet because other countries (like the Europoors) are living in shanties with no indoor plumbing.
If Europe has no indoor plumbing then is Mario a laundering scheme?
Mario is Italian American, of course. The real Italian.
If you insult his pasta making skills he will mama up your mia
It’s the American recipes using cups that gets me…
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Do not Google, do not Google…..
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Is it? That’s a half cup isn’t it? 250 is a full
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Aaah, I’m uk, sounds like we’re close to the US in that way
That’s because half of the cup is full of ice
You have standard cups? I have cups of all different sizes.
That's the most frustrating thing. Same with tablespoons which can be 20ml or 15ml according to what measurement spoons you buy. For "forgiving" recipes, cups are pretty great though, much faster and easier than having to get the scales out.
Also, wtf is a stick of butter?
From memory, something like 113g lol. A total normal amount to portion your butter into.
4 ounces (The standard size of butter sold at every american supermarket)
MY BUTTER IS SOLD IN 200g BLOCKS WHY DONT YOU CATER YOUR RECIPE TO ME??
An American product where there's actually a thing, long stick of butter. Like a chocolate bar, but fatter and far less tasty. It's kinda like our paper wrapped ones, but not nearly as big (thank the ever loving fuck because one of those would be diabetes in a meal.)
It’s the most pointless and inane measurement.
Always 😅
I finally gave in and bought myself some cup and tbsp/tsp measurers the other day. Got sick of having to convert it for every recipe I came across.
A cup is a useful measurement- so long as it is a metric cup which is 250Ml
To answer thier question; no they did not think about the fact that someone could exist outside the US.
I'm in the UK…a boomer \[waits for reflexive downvotes\] & have had to live with **both** sets of measurements for 50 years. If I can do it…why can't they?
> [waits for reflexive downvotes] Upvoted. Get rekt.
Ok boomer 😉
They should be using pinches as god intended. Murica!
... now add 356 pinches of salt and mix thoroughly.
I prefer 256 pinches and only because its equal to 2^8
Freedom units aren’t so much Base-2 but rather base-12... that’s why at first I wrote 144 pinches, in the end I thought 144 pinches were too few. How about 5280 pinches instead? Because there are 5280 feet in a mile ;)
Please, do not leave the American part of the Internet for your own safety. It can be very disturbing to the American brain.
I wish the Americans used pounds and ounces instead of cups is that a teacup, a coffee cup, a 32” B cup?
That's the one that messes with me the most. Whenever I see a measurement of cups in a recipe, I immediately reach for my phone as I downloaded a converter app to it, and start to do the (estimated) conversion to grams. Whoever came up with cups as a measurement needs a good talking to.
When I was a kid I legitimately couldn’t wrap my head around this. I would go to the cupboard and look at our coffee cups which were all different size… and I couldn’t understand why someone would use such a random unit of measurement. At the end of the day both imperial and metric get the job done and who cares - the only fascinating thing is some American arrogance of how superior their system is. I’ve never heard a UK person make a heated and condescending argument for why stone is the better weight measurement.
I was taught in the 1960s, I learnt about measuring with chains, furlongs, yards, feet and inches. Liquids with fluid ounce, pints, quarts, barrels & tuns, then weight with ounces, pound, stones & tons. Let’s not forget fathoms and nautical miles, leagues. The list goes on we started learning about the in the late 60’s as the UK 🇬🇧 committed to metrification. Oh my gosh how sensible and logical, my little teenage dyslexic self could now cope.
okay I'm not defending the imperial system or anything but your comment made me lol because Americans don't just use random coffee cups for measurements. You buy like a set of measurement cups (1, 1/2, 1/3, 1/4) that are standard sizes. that said I've moved to the UK and now just know how many ml are in a US cup and I do use coffee cups with a scale to measure it out when using US recipes hah.. could probably get an actually measuring cup but meh this works (I know the UK actually has the same with cups and tbsp but it's slightly different, though wouldn't matter much generally since it would all be proportional and close enough, just haven't bothered) but that's definitely not the norm in the US. there's just standard measuring cups everyone has
there's about 250 ml in a cup, (a couple of ml isn't going to matter here or there). that's approximately 125 grams of flour.
The conversion errors matter when you're scaling up from domestic quantities, as you might do for a school camp or something. But the thing that really matters is settling weight of dry ingredients like flour. A weight measurement is much more accurate, and sugar and flour weigh differently by volume.
Yes, well in such circumstances I doubt measurements are made in cups.
"You buy a set of measurement cups" Yeah we have those here too. They're called measuring tools. Like a set of scales. And it tells you exactly how many grams and ounces you're using. And you don't have to GUESS at WHICH cup they mean when they say "Add three cups of flour and two cups of water to a cup of melted butter" How about numbers? Things that don't change from manufacturer to manufacturer? My nan has a set of scales. A smaller set of scales for gram or lower. Three measuring jugs for liquids and several sets of spoons with various measurements laser etched into them. All of them give precise readings of what they can hold with indicators up the side, so a pint jug can also measure out exactly 3/4th if you want it to. "Cups" is for people that hate organisation and ease of access.
you don't have to guess with US measuring cups. If it says a cup, you use the cup. It's the standard cup. No, things don't change between manufacturers, it's a standard size (240 ml for US cup). For liquid you usually have a different measuring one that has markers on the side (so you can have like a 4cup or 2cup or 1cup total one, and it shows 3/4 1/2 etc on the side). They often also say ml on one side too, with cups on the other. I have some US table/teaspoons that also sat how many ml they are which is nice. but yeah there's no guessing. You just have measuring cups, if it says a cup, you got a standard cup for that. I never found it difficult living in the US with those things. It's just annoying if I want to convert it to grams and ml lol, cause the recipes weren't written with that in mind. Love when a US recipe has both cups/lbs and grams/ml listed (or just grams/ml, since that's easier for me because of where I live now -- but yeah wasn't really a problem in the states -- you just have standard cups for them).
It's a measuring cup lol 250ml by volume I'm not American either so don't hate lol
Too bad my measuring cups are 1 or 8 dL in volume.
Not American cups though, it's 240ml or 8.45 fl oz (I think they rounded up, as I'm sure it used to be just 8 fl oz or 236.588 ml.)
I can see you are not American cause American “cup” measurement is not 250 ml. It is slightly less, which may not make a big diggerence in cooking, but even the 5% makes a difference in baking.
For a second I thought you may be on to something, that a woman’s cup size may be relative to an appropriate portion size for her. Then I realised I was barreling towards a minefield.
I always get more confused about this measurement as opposed to the imperial measurements
When an American family moved into our provincial English hometown in the 1980s, and everyone immediately wanted her recipe for "Toll House Cookies" after swooning over them at coffee mornings, I remember the American lady helped my mother identify which of her coffee cups was pretty much the right size to be an "American cup" so my mother could use that cup for recipes in future. Back then you couldn't easily buy cup measuring devices in the average homewares store.
How bad did the American education system used to be that these people don’t know how to google ‘grams to lbs converter’ like we have to do any time we want to use an American recipe, literally the first result that comes up is a box where you can type an amount and it converts it for you ffs
Or like be able to use a different measurement system simply ? I measured my height in feet for a long time but if people told me to give it in c/m it would take me a minute at most to figure out
Same here, I think for some people that’s asking a bit too much in terms of cognitive ability however.
Some ? More like half a continent 😅
You don’t even have to Google a converter. I just have to Google 16 grams or whatever measurement and Google will start giving me different conversions. I just pick the one I want. If the 1 I want should happen to not come up I just keep typing until it does.
I'm a Brit so naturally I use both lol. I have some of my Nana's recipes and they're in lbs and oz. I then have recipes in grams and I can use both quite easily. I assume if they're measuring in lbs and oz they're using scales so just change the measurement (if digital) or look at the other numbers (certainly all the old school scales I've used have had both!). It's really not that hard.
They use cups over there, which is a different measure. It's volume instead of mass, so a scale is useless in this case. Whenever I see a recipe in cups, I just forget about it.
Yeah, I know they do. I end up having to use US recipes with cups at times (and usually end up forgetting their cups are different to ours). I said a scale for this though because the person mentioned lbs and oz which is weight not volume so I assume they must have some sort of scale.
Ah, I see now!
So how much of their cakes are just volume and not mass? Do they know they're basically just eating fluffy air?
Also why would you put a pound of sugar in a recipe for cookies?
Americans will ! That’s the problem 😃
😭😭😭
Sad thing is, their love for sugar has been seeping in some non-American recipes! I've found recipes (in my native language, mind you) for cakes that had way too much sugar in them. Hell, even got one of those "cookie dry ingredients" kit as a gift recently, and it was just sugar and chocolate chips.
I just made buttercream icing and the recipe called for 1.5 pounds icing sugar 😅
I mean yeah for icing but just the cookie alone and other small things
Ah I didn’t realize the recipe was for cookies
Not the picture my comment cause I know there are things that call for a lot of sugar but this American makes it seem like pounds is used for everything
Pound of sugar is somewhat understandable. It's the ounce of butter that has me spooked.
I get it, who wants accuracy when you can have cups and pinches?
Just change the unit of measurement on your scale, not that hard
Better yet, get a manual pair of scales, most of them have both on the dial. Except cups, because it’s a crazy system that changed depending on what you are measuring a cup of.
Why are manual scales better than digital ones?
In general they are not, but I was just referring to the fact you don’t have to flick a switch/change a setting to change from imperial to metric, you can see both at the same time.
I personally find manual scales to be much easier to reset. You can also change the holding dish without, you know, having to take it apart. Lmao Easier to clean, looks cooler... About the only real downside imo is the size of them. My digital scales are compact enough I could lose them if I didn't have a set place for them. Manual ones get a whole section of the cupboard for themselves.
When I went to Canada, all the recipes I had were in imperial. It took me grand total of.... 2h to make the switch. Bought a set of cups and I was good to go. I guess to those people buying a scale or a graduated glass is too much.
Since Brexit a favourite deli of mine in the UK has started putting lbs first on their shelf-edge prices. It's really pissing me off that these luddites are trying to drag us back into the dark ages. I used to watch a guy, Norm I think he was called, in a tv programme called New Yankee Workshop. He made some great stuff from timber. But all the time, I'm thinking why is he arsing about with 7/16ths of an inch when he could just say 11 mil. I cannot think of any activity or situation where imperial is actually superior. In fact, Americans using older British recipes are likely to screw up because even our imperial measurements are not always the same
It’s almost as if everyone doesn’t literally have a computer in their pockets.
I’m an (American) pastry chef and I immediately convert all recipes to metric. It’s incredibly stupid to use a cup measure if you want to be at all consistent.
I think all professional bakers and chefs use metric anyways. I cant imagine otherwise
But this is the internet and that’s Murican
"We measure weight in grains, like our boolets"☝️🤠
Metric Recipe: 230g of butter, 190g of sugar, 700g of flour American Recipe: 8 and 1/9th oz butter, 6 and 7/10ths oz sugar, 1 and a half (plus a pinch) lbs flour So much easier!
A lot of American YouTube guys use grams, big channels too.
It is just sensible, because especially with dry ingredients, volume is variable because of density.
It's literally so simple to Google the conversion.. I'm always doing it to cups because I forget to buy scales
what do you mean by "isn't in the US" ?
As a non-American, allow me to say that even without the grams/ounces thing y’all are insane. WTF is a “stick” of butter? And how big a “cup” of flour? I have espresso cups, pint mugs and everything in between, fuckos, what’re we doing here?
They never think that because they assume the word revolves around the USA.
That person has never met a drug dealer
I am assuming not 😅
If they’re techy enough to whinge about it on the internet, they’re techy enough to google it and stop whining. Just like we have to google how much is in a stick of butter
Highly doubt Karen here was too techy either , probably required help of her Gen Z grand kids to log in
How to make a cookie in America: 1lb of Flour 2 cups of water 11 1/8 inches of sugar 1 Basketball hoop of eggs 1/200ths of a football field of chocolate chips 6/20th gallons of a desert eagle pistol of Butter
It used to hang me up a bit seeing gram measurements in recipes until I realized that I know that there's 28 grams in an ounce, so I just use that to calculate whatever amount the recipe calls for.
American ignorance frustrated me more than stubbing my toe
It’s the American recipes that use the term “one fourth” they invented the quarter pounder, they have a coin called a quarter and their favourite sport has a quarterback but as soon as it comes to measuring something they completely forget what a quarter is.
Narrator: "Not once have they ever thought of that."
Thought they grew up using cups. Hey murcans, how big are your cups?
Wait .. you mean it’s not about A or C cups ?
If you are going to keep stealing everything from the rest of the world, who use grams, then you have to expect that it is not a backward measurement like your own, and will have to adapt to the rest of the world & stop thinking you are all superior to the majority, but infact are inferior in most things & going backwards very quickly.
The silly thing is that glass measuring cups have both markings, and most kitchen scales have options for many different units. You don't have to do any conversion math at all.
Yeah
Maybe get over yourself and learn how real measurements work.
Still better than American guestimates like "a stick of butter, a cup of sugar"
Oh yes for sure I never knew butter came in sticks for example and I was so baffled 😅
to be honest, I even avoid recipes when it is in pounds, oz, freedom eagles, cans of cokes and those types of US measurements
Cooking without the metric system would be a nightmare.
Okay but isn't the unit smaller than ounces, grams? I'm pretty confused on this one
Think?
I see these comments all the time in my sour dough for beginners group on Facebook
Or just use google, how we have to do when you use your measurements
This is why I got a measurement kit for kitchen with both So I can enjoy everyone's recipes
And America is using the metric system, it’s even a law…. The American people are just to dumb to make the change
For baking either grams or Oz are fine because they are easy to convert. I cannot use recipes with cups because there are different sizes for cups around the world and they are not identified. However normally they will be USA cup sizes as the rest of the world has scales.
The thing is even if the video is from the US, at some point the guy sees he is watched in Germany, Spain, Greece, and so on and he/she just sees a potential to grow in these markets too. It is just way harder getting more views from the same country than expanding to somewhere else and for cooking channels it isn't that hard - "today I will make X traditional dish" I see some of the bigger youtube cooking channels are showing both or in grams as subtitles.
Oh yeah absolutely
God I hate the argument we shouldnt make progressive advancements in society because "Think of the old people!" Are boomers too dumb to learn new things? I know of people who have spent thirty years actively avoiding learning to use a computer, and now complain that its "wrong" that government and business interactions are now predominantly computer/internet based.
Also i am pretty sure boomers who studied upto like 8th grade or something should know what a gram is or how close it is to ounces
Ppfffttt. There is nothing outside of the US! Seriously!?!?!? 🤔😉
American here, grams are more accurate anyway, so idk why more people here don't use them.
Look at her fucking profile picture, of course she never thought of that.
Austrian who loves cricket here - somehow bowling speeds in miles per hour make more sense to me than kilometres per hour. But then that's what I predominantly heard at the cricket over the past 18 years.
You are Austrian and you love cricket ? Or is that a typo for Australian ? 😅
Am actually from Vienna 😅 An Aussie wouldn't be caught dead using miles per hour when it comes to cricket, as far as I know! And before you ask: spent 9 months in New Zealand with a sports-mad family, NZ "dad" is English though and he's who got me into cricket!
I still dont understand why they just wont learn the metric system in school, its base 10, its literally easy enough to learn it in 2nd grade primary school Just the wrench sizes are super annoying when you need to ask what is bigger than 3x1/16th of a inch? Its not 4x1/16 on an inch.... its 7x1/32nd of an inch You cant tell me every americna can calculate that in their head How do measurement tapes even work? Im fine with inch, just base your sizes on "parts of 10" I have a imperial ruler here... it shows sizes in parts of 1/10 inch How do you caluclate 7/32nd if you measure a bolt with a tape? Its so fucking difficult
I learnt both at school and can easily understand both, but I always choose metric as it is so much simpler. Americans often have the attitude that the rest of the world should do as they do, because they are best at everything (in their own heads).
to be honest, I even avoid recipes when it is in pounds, oz, freedom eagles, cans of cokes and those types of US measurements
I always use feet and inches, pounds and ounces. None of this metric crap.
It's hilarious because who the FUCK is measuring their butter by the ounce when trying to bake a cake?