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Comment by enkid | Hacker News Reader

How widely known is the Imperial System in the UK? Do people commonly think in lbs and oz?

The UK's system is very simple. Weight: stone for humans, kg for everything else, unless you're over 60 then it's lb. Or if the human is a newborn then it's always lb. But younger humans measure themselves in kg. But if it's weed then it's oz. But coke is g. Length: feet and inches for the height of a human, and for the waist/leg/neck measurements. But feet? No, that's just a random number. Distances are metres, unless they're long then they're miles, and if they're at sea they're nautical miles. An aeroplane's altitude is in feet, but your altitude up a mountain is in metres. Volume is easy. Beer is in pints, so are milk and blood. But water and juice are in litres. Petrol comes in litres, but your consumption of petrol is in miles per gallon. Energy is btu if you're old fashioned and you're measuring natural gas, otherwise it's kWh, unless it's food then it's kcal. Joules are for science class. Speed is miles an hour, except at sea when it's knots.

Letting each individual shop decide what measurement of weight to use will work out great.

People over a certain age do, and that age tends to be different for different units. I'm 40, and 'natively' think in miles; both litres and pints (but not gallons or fluid ounces); kilos (except personal weight in stones); all of millimetres, centimetres, inches, feet, and metres (but not fractions of inches or things like furlongs or rods); and degrees Celsius (except for outdoor temps which are Fahrenheit). Younger people lose Fahrenheit (no longer used on weather forecasts) and stones, and use pints only for beer (milk in glass pint bottles is now rare). Older people use gallons, hundredweight, fractions of inches, and (especially) pounds and ounces. Everyone uses miles, some people know kms as well.

It's basically a bit of a sticky mess, but one with a clear direction of travel. And this announcement is for cheap popularity amongst older voters, who use metric less. The number of items that will be marked in Imperial only is going too be very small, because it'll confuse the young and mean different packaging is needed to sell abroad. A few cantankerous market traders will probably do it, but it's always been legal to give prices for both measuring systems simultaneously so there's not really much of an issue to solve.

Very much a generational thing. I'm early 30s and think in miles for distance/speed, pints for beer, feet for height and metric for everything else.

This has always been a niche issue for the baby boomer generation, I don't know anyone of my generation that gives a damn other than metric being more sensible for international compatibility.

Much like Brexit certain parts of the older and more politically powerful / numerous generation go off the deep end about this stuff, e.g. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metric_Martyrs

Out of curiosity (as a non-brit), do you ever measure anything in pints that's not a beer?

I'm somewhat aware that milk might still be sold in pints - I just find it interesting that the word has in common usage really lost the connotation of being a measurement and just mostly means "a beer" now.

E.g. "I'm going out for a pint", "I've had a couple of pints", "I'm not much of a drinker, but I'll have a pint or two a month".

I genuinely have forgotten now but I think you're right that milk is still pints. I just think of them as "the little one, the normal one and the big one" which I think are 1/2/4 pints respectively.

I think where stuff is still normally discussed in pints it's due to that still being the standard measure for retail. For whatever reason milk and beer retained the pint. Also volume of blood in pints weirdly seems to be standard, e.g. when talking about medical stuff informally.

The only measure that seems to have gone fully metric in day to day life outside of a few holdouts is temperature.

Milk is both. Reusable delivered glass bottles are pints. Small supermarket plastic bottles are 568ml (1pt). Larger ones are either 1136ml (2pt) or 1l. Big ones are 2l and 3l.

The beer context still applies in other more metric countries too. The 250ml glass is known as the 'demi' in French, meaning half a (metricated) pint.

Apparently you may order 1 oz of whiskey and get 25mL in England and Whales, but 35 mL in North Ireland and Scotland.

So I say they think differently about it, but they all know.

Maybe someone from UK can elaborate further.

It's not (at least currently) legal to sell whisky in a pub in ounces. Until the 80s(?) it was sold in fractions of a gill: 1/6, 1/5, or 1/4. It's now sold in millilitres, usually either 25ml or 35ml. It's at the pub's discretion, I think: 35ml is very common in Scotland, but it's the measure in some English pubs too. There are legal requirements to post notices informing customers what your pub's measure size is (and for wine glasses, too).

Draught beer, on the other hand, is obliged to be sold in 1/3 and/or 1/2 pint measures or multiples thereof. So that's strictly Imperial. But bottled beer is labeled in ml and is now routinely 330ml or 500ml. [Edit: but you can sell pint bottles if you want to - you just need to label them 568ml as well! There are a lot of 454g jars of jam out there for the same reason...]

No, weights are metric but distances are imperial. Distances are in miles and speed is in mph.

Dunno 'bout you-all but for this US ex-pat, all the metric stuff is very much okay EXCEPT for them pesky Celsius degrees. After umpteen years, still doing mental conversions.

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