Miles & kilometres: why do so many people still reference miles?

AndyBoBandy

(maybe this belongs in After Hours? Apologies if it does..)

I don't know why, but it bugs me a little when people still reference distances in Ireland in miles as opposed to kilometres.

I don't really (that much) mind your every day John or Joe quoting miles, but when I see officials/politicians/"important people" etc.. on the news/TV saying something is/was 5 miles down the road, or 20 miles from wherever.. it annoys me a little.

I started driving in 1998 when we were still using miles, but have had no issue whatsoever changing to km's now when referencing distance/speeds etc...
I'm no maths buff, but I can easily convert any distance/speed from miles to km's (almost without thinking about it now at this stage)

(I have driven about 200,000/300,000 km's in mainland Europe over the last 10 years or so, so maybe I've slightly adapted to using km's a little more than would be expected here in Ireland since we changed over).

Does this bother anyone else?

or am I just mental?

ardmacha

Many people in Ireland are west Brits. You only have to see the continual reference to stones even in publicly financed ads by Safe Food and the like.

AndyBoBandy

ardmacha wrote: »

Many people in Ireland are west Brits. You only have to see the continual reference to stones even in publicly financed ads by Safe Food and the like.

true, I'd actually be guilty of that myself if I'm being honest!

I still reference my weight in stones!

SpaceTime

Hundreds of years of using miles,proximity culturally to the UK and US media which uses miles and RTE and other media outlets not coming up with a snappier name.

Kilo-metres (odd way of saying it) an hour instead of just 'kays' like the Australians say.

A long combersome phrase won't catch on where it's replacing a monosyllabic word.

SpaceTime

What I don't understand is why we didn't embrace the metric system in 1920s.
It was obviously a 'symbol of imperialism'

Just found it odd that the nuns and priests of the education system continued to just translate it into Irish and bash totally illogical, complicated, non-metric tables into people for decades.

I think the metric system definitely benefits people a lot because it makes calculations easier and maths more logical.

There's something almost antiscientific about the old system.

Until we start actually making the metric system part of culture, I don't think it's going to change though.
Things like measuring weights in stone instead of kg doesn't make an awful lot of sense in reality.

The one I find absolutely nuts is people asking for amounts of things in pounds at counters that can only weigh in kg.

I mean, how hard is it to get used to? 1 kg is the weight of a litre of milk. You should have a feel for it by now!

hardCopy

I did my driving test in 2005 so pretty much always thought of road distances in KM.

I'm 30 now and don't think we ever did much imperial school.

I have no real concept of miles but I could look up the road and tell how many metres away the next lamppost/junction is.

Our politicians and newsreaders are of older generation, I'd guess metric will begin to dominate over time.

SpaceTime

You'd be surprised though at how many people talk about 'miles' even without any notion what one actually is!
They're still extensively used colloquially by younger people.

I think it'll change as people start reading more online maps and stuff like that as you get used to "in 200 meters .. turn left"

I got totally confused when my satnav suddenly decided to start using Yards in the UK and I actually have to put a post-it note on the dash board if I'm in an Irish car in the UK to remind me what speed I'm supposed to be at.

I do think though we need to take our lead from the Aussis and start calling them "k's" rather than "kilo-metres" or whatever it is RTE calls them.

John lives 30k's away.
I was doing 79k's when the cops pulled me over...

and so on.

I mean we run a "10 K race" not a "10 kilometre race" so why do we insist on saying the full word on RTE etc?

Seems like one of those weird "official Ireland" things like the strict refusal to use a plural for the Euro currency. There's no rule about that other than one that a few people here made up.

RTE News tends to deliberately use official pronunciations of places too instead of what they're know by:
Portlaoise "Port Laois" and Dun Laoghaire (Locally known as "Done Leary")

Subpopulus

It's a generation thing really. Older people think in terms of pounds of meat and ounces of butter because that's what they were brought up with. I reckon the vast majority of people under the age of 30 don't use pints or pounds or ounces. I for one have little sense of what a pound of something is.

I'm only in my mid twenties but as a child my weight was always measured in stone and road signs still had miles on them, so I have a good idea of what these measurements mean, though I pretty much never use them these days.

I was chatting to a farmer in his sixties recently and I mentioned some staggering fact in terms of metres - all i got was a blank stare. I quickly converted it into feet and he immediately grasped it. He basically had no conception of metres in his head. Something I find really annoying is reading the likes of the National Geographic, which doesn't produce an english language version with metric measurements, so most of the measurements are essentially gibberish to me.

Imperial measurements will die out eventually, except in the most colloquial terms, like saying a gap was an inch wide, rather than saying that it was 3cm. Imperial is handy when you're talking, since you can be quite vague - saying saying something is miles away has a nicer ring than saying something is kilometres away.

It's more annoying in Britain, which is kinda stuck between both systems. I was watching the Tour de France recently and the commentator converted almost every measurement in metric to imperial as he spoke for the benefit of his audience. It's also a frustration when you travel to the North and all the road signs change to imperial and speeds and distances don't make as much sense in your head anymore.

Mrs Dempsey

Andybobandy wrote: »

....Does this bother anyone else?

or am I just mental?

It makes me so mad that I drop my pint :-)

Iwannahurl

Andybobandy wrote: »

I still reference my weight in stones!

Why?

If you can answer that question then you know why other people still talk about miles, feet, inches and other outmoded measures.

Ireland has -- surprise surprise -- made a mess of adopting the metric system. Stupid quantities such as our 454 gramme packs of butter ensure that we hang on to our Imperial relics.

My kids go to a school where the principal, and some of the teachers, are barely able to comprehend metric units, and I regularly hear 7-year-olds talking about their weight in "stone". Utterly daft.

The superiority of the decimal system is incontestable from the point of view of arithmetical simplicity. For this reason alone I think the motion should commend itself to the Seanad. It is a very important fact that by adopting the metric system we would save at least, I think, two years' training of the children in school. One of the great drawbacks of the English system is the lack of any connection between one set of tables and another. They are mostly of a lengthy and complicated character, and involve an incalculable waste of time in learning during school years, and are mostly forgotten shortly afterwards. [...] The British system has really nothing to recommend it except the fact that it exists. It is hopelessly out of date.

~Senator J. T. O'Farrell, 1923. http://historical-debates.oireachtas.ie/S/0001/S.0001.192305090007.html

Iwannahurl

SpaceTime wrote: »

Kilo-metres (odd way of saying it) an hour instead of just 'kays' like the Australians say.

A long combersome phrase won't catch on where it's replacing a monosyllabic word.

What matters is the numbers. Why retain, and continue to popularise, a cumbersome system of units?

"Kilo-metres" is correct, because kilo- is the prefix denoting one thousand. KilOMetres is the oddity, and is probably derived from words such as "speedometer" which are unrelated.

gctest50

yip

Iwannahurl

gctest50 wrote: »

http://i.imgur.com/Ft6qQE7.jpg

yip

http://edition.cnn.com/TECH/space/9909/30/mars.metric.02/

http://www.news.com.au/technology/science/india-becomes-first-country-to-enter-mars-orbit-on-their-first-attempt/story-fnjwlcze-1227068835676

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metrication_in_India

hmmm

Andybobandy wrote: »

Does this bother anyone else?

or am I just mental?

It's just a generational thing. We grew up speaking about "miles, pence and pound", and even for me today they would be my instinctive words - it takes a mental switch to say kms, cents & euros. Human brains are complicated things and it's hard to break a pattern

KrustyBurger

I'm old school as well as I grew up with miles, stones, lbs and quids. Still use them. No intention of not using them. It's just how I think about distance etc.

Mongarra

Even one of the candidates in the by-election debate last night was talking about pounds - as in currency, not weight.

ongarboy

I think OP would find that probably most people under 30 use kms and most over use miles. It's a generational thing whereby people still use the terminology they grew up with. You shouldn't let it bother you. With each passing decade you'll find more and more generations that only know kms or the metric system. I'm late 30s and automatically think in miles, inches and feet even though I grew up in that transition generation where we were also thought metric system at school. If people think instinctively in miles, you can harldy expect them to multiply by 1.6 before the word comes out of their mouth.

Depending on which city they come from, some people still refer to Brown Thomas as Switzers, Cash's, Moons or Todds! (maybe you'd need to be over 40 to get that one!!):)

Benster

I don't think it's generational at all, sure it's not even a decade since the switch was made to road signage from imperial to metric. It's going to take a generation for people to stop using the imperial references and until then allowance will just have to be made for those of us who were educated with and used the imperial system for most of our lives. At a guess I would say that is possibly 90% of the country.

I think it's a bit much to be moaning about how the country hasn't made a complete change and adapted to something which is still relatively new.

And to add another 2c, apart from wanting to be seen as more Euro-facing, I don't really see why it needed to be changed. Face it, most of our trade is from the UK, and most of our tourism is from there too.
Right, that'll rattle the Brit-haters' cages a bit more then. On ye go...

Alun

Well, I'm 57, and was brought up in England with Imperial measurements, but apart from pints in the pub, I never use the old measurements at all in my daily life now. In fact I couldn't even tell you my weight in stones, or height in feet and inches without converting them from metric first. I've just come back from a walking holiday in England, and the look on peoples' faces when I talked about the distance we'd walked in kilometres was priceless.

Iwannahurl

hmmm wrote: »

It's just a generational thing. We grew up speaking about "miles, pence and pound", and even for me today they would be my instinctive words - it takes a mental switch to say kms, cents & euros. Human brains are complicated things and it's hard to break a pattern

How does it takes a mental switch when road signs are already in Km and Km/h?

Mind you, in that regard one of my personal favourite examples of Irish road signage is in Co. Clare near St. Tola's Church (aka Dysert O'Dea). When I was there a few years ago there were signs showing the distance as "1", without any units specified. After following the road for about a kilometre, I came across another identical sign directing me another "1" up a side road.

Perhaps the OPW was doing the usual Irish thing of trying to keep everyone a little bit happy, in this case both metric European and Imperial British/American/Irish visitors.

The signs can still be seen on Google Maps.

hmmm

Iwannahurl wrote: »

How does it takes a mental switch when road signs are already in Km and Km/h?

Because a km means nothing to me, but I know in my head approximately how long a mile is.

If we replaced kms in the morning with something else, you'd be doing a mental calculation back into kms.

NedNew2

I think once all pre2005 cars disappear off the road then the usage of miles will fade rapidly. Its an anochronism at this stage but I do think the use of km really has taken hold in the past few years. I remember about 10 years ago to mention kms for distance would get some weird looks but now it is (thankfully) completely normal.

We had a system where road signs were in km, spped limits in mph - that is non-sensical. The system we have now is modern, logical and sensible.

I think also there isn't really c country which is 100% 'metric'. Central America for example use fluid ounces, otherwise it is totally metric. Peru uses a gallon for petrol measurements. Germany uses a Pfund (pound) for 500g (a metric rounded version) etc.

Also in Spain and Italy there are many instance of people still converting euro prices mentally back to Pesetas and Liras, so its not just an Irish phenomenen.

As an indicator who remembers cwt? My father mentioned lots of things were measured in cwt (hundred weight) back in his day. I've no idea how much that is.

cnoc

As an indicator who remembers cwt? My father mentioned lots of things were measured in cwt (hundred weight) back in his day. I've no idea how much that is.[/QUOTE]


1 cwt = 112 lbs = 50.8 kg

cnoc

Andybobandy wrote: »

(maybe this belongs in After Hours? Apologies if it does..)

I don't know why, but it bugs me a little when people still reference distances in Ireland in miles as opposed to kilometres.


Would that be Irish miles or English miles?

MrCreosote

A mile is an easy distance to get a feel for, cos it's exactly 8 furlongs. Simple!

Problem with a km is that it's just under 5 furlongs, which makes it much harder.

Iwannahurl

hmmm wrote: »

Because a km means nothing to me, but I know in my head approximately how long a mile is.

If we replaced kms in the morning with something else, you'd be doing a mental calculation back into kms.

I don't understand how a kilometre can "mean nothing", when our road signs and speed limits are in metric. If you can know it's a mile between two points, it's just as easy to know another two points between which it's 1 km, 2 km or whatever.

When people go into a shop they don't normally have any trouble identifying a 2 litre container of milk, even if they don't read the label.

Iwannahurl

MrCreosote wrote: »

A mile is an easy distance to get a feel for, cos it's exactly 8 furlongs. Simple!

Problem with a km is that it's just under 5 furlongs, which makes it much harder.

About 40 furlongs from Glenties, Co. Donegal:

Unfinished 1 ½ storey residence and mobile home on 6 Acres 2 Roods 6 Perches and one undivided eight part of 23 Acres 1 Rood and 13 Perches.

http://www.daft.ie/sales/mulnamina-glenties-donegal/997547/

Carawaystick

Part of the reason is the fack it's 25% of the syllables to say miles

I use the word yards instead of metres for this all the time except when I need better precision, like athletic races or such

Then you have nautical miles, which are natural units, where each is one minute of arc of longitude of the sea where you are

hmmm

Iwannahurl wrote: »

When people go into a shop they don't normally have any trouble identifying a 2 litre container of milk, even if they don't read the label.

Have you seen the mental confusion caused to Irish people when they try and order "pints" in Europe and are given half litres?

Carawaystick

hmmm wrote: »

Have you seen the mental confusion caused to Irish people when they try and order "pints" in Europe and are given half litres?

That's not as bad as getting a pint across the Atlantic

Germans still use a pfund unit of weight

Subpopulus

Benster wrote: »

Apart from wanting to be seen as more Euro-facing, I don't really see why it needed to be changed. Face it, most of our trade is from the UK, and most of our tourism is from there too.

When Ireland decided to go metric in the early 70s the US and the UK were also going metric, the whole world was expected to be metric by the millennium. The US never really followed through on that, and the UK made most of the changes, except for things like road signs, food quantities, peoples weights etc.

Basically, the whole of the developed world uses metric. If we hadn't changed we'd be left behind. Anywhere that doesn't use the metric system is either some backward third world country or the US. The US gets away with it because it's large and insular enough to have it's own measurement system. The UK, despite the things mentioned above, is largely metric. A small outward-looking economy like ours would have to use metric measurements to be able to efficiently compete for business etc.

In any case, why use a random hodgepodge of old measurements (some of which go back to medieval times) that are often unfit for the twenty-first century, when there is a lovely interlinked decimal system sitting right there that virtually the entirety of the rest of the world uses.

porsche959

ardmacha wrote: »

Many people in Ireland are west Brits. You only have to see the continual reference to stones even in publicly financed ads by Safe Food and the like.

:rolleyes:

Sheldons Brain

ardmacha wrote:

Many people in Ireland are west Brits. You only have to see the continual reference to stones even in publicly financed ads by Safe Food and the like.

I've also never understood why the GAA, which changes its field measurements to metric 2 years ago in a forward looking move, will have programmes for minor games without a trace of metric for player details , although these weren't even born at that time.

Iwannahurl wrote: »

Why?
Ireland has -- surprise surprise -- made a mess of adopting the metric system. Stupid quantities such as our 454 gramme packs of butter ensure that we hang on to our Imperial relics.

This is not entirely accidental, butter is sold in 454g containers in the South and 500g in the North while cheese was the other way around. This related to the butter subsidies in the 1980s.

My kids go to a school where the principal, and some of the teachers, are barely able to comprehend metric units, and I regularly hear 7-year-olds talking about their weight in "stone". Utterly daft.

No excuse for teachers not doing better, but you also have to wonder what information they are receiving from the Dept etc.

rab!dmonkey

kms/km's

Stop. Unit symbols are never pluralised

Carawaystick wrote: »

Then you have nautical miles, which are natural units, where each is one minute of arc of longitude of the sea where you are

The nautical mile has a fixed value. It's accepted for use with the SI too, so you can switch between nautical miles and kilometres as you please.

endacl

ardmacha wrote: »

Many people in Ireland are west Brits. You only have to see the continual reference to stones even in publicly financed ads by Safe Food and the like.

Post #2? West Brits?!?

Do you struggle at all under the weight of that enormous chip?

endacl

cnoc wrote: »

Andybobandy wrote: »

(maybe this belongs in After Hours? Apologies if it does..)

I don't know why, but it bugs me a little when people still reference distances in Ireland in miles as opposed to kilometres.


Would that be Irish miles or English miles?

Nautical.

Iwannahurl

Subpopulus wrote: »

Basically, the whole of the developed world uses metric. If we hadn't changed we'd be left behind. Anywhere that doesn't use the metric system is either some backward third world country or the US.

Officially there are only three countries that have not adopted the Metric system: Liberia, Myanmar/Burma and the USA.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/ab/Metric_system_adoption_map.svg

If there is a list of countries that have pretended to adopt the Metric system, or have adopted it in a half-arsed way, or are taking a stupidly long time to adopt it properly, then Ireland is in there somewhere.

Sam Kade

Andybobandy wrote: »

(maybe this belongs in After Hours? Apologies if it does..)

I don't know why, but it bugs me a little when people still reference distances in Ireland in miles as opposed to kilometres.

I don't really (that much) mind your every day John or Joe quoting miles, but when I see officials/politicians/"important people" etc.. on the news/TV saying something is/was 5 miles down the road, or 20 miles from wherever.. it annoys me a little.

I started driving in 1998 when we were still using miles, but have had no issue whatsoever changing to km's now when referencing distance/speeds etc...
I'm no maths buff, but I can easily convert any distance/speed from miles to km's (almost without thinking about it now at this stage)

(I have driven about 200,000/300,000 km's in mainland Europe over the last 10 years or so, so maybe I've slightly adapted to using km's a little more than would be expected here in Ireland since we changed over).

Does this bother anyone else?

or am I just mental?

What really annoys me is how Irish get bugged nowadays instead of annoyed :mad:

CelticRambler

What's all this about the "under thirties" ??? I'm a few years away from being one of the "over forties" but I've lived with metric since I was in secondary school. Did my head in though when we started having babies and all the wimminfolk were talking in lbs and flozs. FFS? The cat was 4.3kg and ate 80g of nuggets a day. Why did the sprogs have to get dosed with flozs of baby milk? Well, they didn't when I was making up the bottles :pac:

That was nearly twenty years ago and we were in England at the time, so maybe there was some excuse (and even then we bought our petrol in litres) but I've got a new Dublin-born niece since last month and sure enough she came out weighing lbs not kgs. Maybe it's because her mother's a teacher?

AndyBoBandy

Sam Kade wrote: »

What really annoys me is how Irish get bugged nowadays instead of annoyed :mad:

Well, I was only a little annoyed, and didn't want to convey the fact I was fully annoyed, only a little annoyed, about 5/8 annoyed, hence bugged.

SpaceTime

Iwannahurl wrote: »

About 40 furlongs from Glenties, Co. Donegal:

I'll consider offering two guineas for it!

Estate agents are sort of stuck in a bit of another era.

Some French ones still use pricing in Francs....

Skatedude

Distance is milles.
Height is feet and inches.
cars have MPH and MPG and Horsepower.
we have been using this for generations and many, many years. Just because someone in the government decides we dont use them means nothing. people will use what they have always used.

I bet if they decided to change to furlongs, people would still use what they always used

SpaceTime

CelticRambler wrote: »

What's all this about the "under thirties" ??? I'm a few years away from being one of the "over forties" but I've lived with metric since I was in secondary school. Did my head in though when we started having babies and all the wimminfolk were talking in lbs and flozs. FFS? The cat was 4.3kg and ate 80g of nuggets a day. Why did the sprogs have to get dosed with flozs of baby milk? Well, they didn't when I was making up the bottles :pac:

That was nearly twenty years ago and we were in England at the time, so maybe there was some excuse (and even then we bought our petrol in litres) but I've got a new Dublin-born niece since last month and sure enough she came out weighing lbs not kgs. Maybe it's because her mother's a teacher?

I don't think the imperial system has been taught here since the mid 1970s so you'd need to be born in the 60s or before to encounter it.

The nuns and Christian brothers even moved on to beating people up with metre sticks before or was abolished. Thankfully I missed that era entirely.

It's just one of those things.

I find it mind boggling that gym equipment here will usually be set to American units. I'd a cross trainer asking for my weight in lbs (I'd need a calculator to figure that out) and setting targets in miles when races here are all in km.

The next machine a rower was in metres.

Running machine - back to Americanism.

It's obvious though that people can change. Fahrenheit completely dropped out of use because weather forecasts stopped using it.

I wish Met Éireann would use km/h wind speeds consistently though. They regularly default to knots which are meaningless to 95% of the audience.

hmmm

Re metric & imperial conversion, this is the saddest/funniest story
http://www.wired.com/2010/11/1110mars-climate-observer-report/

1999: A disaster investigation board reports that NASA’s Mars Climate Orbiter burned up in the Martian atmosphere because engineers failed to convert units from English to metric.

SpaceTime

hmmm wrote: »

Re metric & imperial conversion, this is the saddest/funniest story
http://www.wired.com/2010/11/1110mars-climate-observer-report/

Engineering using non metric is just stupid nonsense that makes calculating things unnecessarily complex.

BMJD

I'll have 568ml of your finest porter, sir!

That doesn't sound right, does it?

Subpopulus

SpaceTime wrote: »

I wish Met Éireann would use km/h wind speeds consistently though. They regularly default to knots which are meaningless to 95% of the audience.

I presume you're referring to their costal forecast, which only uses knots. That's for the benefit of those in the maritime community, and not for the average joes. Who apart from sailors and fishermen needs to known the wind speed off Fastnet rock?

L1011

gctest50 wrote: »

yip

Plenty of other stuff that didn't get in to space because of the yanks inability to use proper measurements, though.

Judgement Day

ardmacha wrote: »

Many people in Ireland are west Brits. You only have to see the continual reference to stones even in publicly financed ads by Safe Food and the like.

Or could it be that some of us refuse to be treated like sheep and lap up everything our European 'masters' throw at us? :rolleyes:

SpaceTime

Subpopulus wrote: »

I presume you're referring to their costal forecast, which only uses knots. That's for the benefit of those in the maritime community, and not for the average joes. Who apart from sailors and fishermen needs to known the wind speed off Fastnet rock?

Nope they do it online in non coastal / maritime / salty contexts too.

They should always list both as people haven't a notion what customary maritime units are.

Iwannahurl

Judgement Day wrote: »

Or could it be that some of us refuse to be treated like sheep and lap up everything our European 'masters' throw at us? :rolleyes:

Ignoring a modern and rational system of measures and continuing to use an outmoded and absurd system, just because lots of other people are doing the same, is what I would call sheep-like behaviour.