this post was submitted on 01 Dec 2025
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That is a very interesting take. I can't relate to most of the advantages of imperial you mentioned since I've grown up with primarily metric. Exposure to a specific system for a certain period of time lets the mind just acclimate to that system (calculations inclusive), and conversion to imperial just feels like a chore to me. That being said, I can definitely see where you're coming from.
Thank you for this detailed answer.
Of course! You've hit the nail on the head, in that anyone can get used to anything if you grow up with it. Your brain wraps itself around your environment, and the language and descriptions you grow up with are the framework for your understanding of things.
It's like naming colors of the rainbow. The number of discrete colors you see depends on the number of discrete names your language has for those colors. Roy G Biv is just one method of delineation. Some languages don't separate blue and green, or red and orange. We actually see millions of colors, but our brain structures categories based on the words we have to describe them.
We use base 10 numbering, because we have five fingers on each hand. Imaging what the metric system would look like if 360 million years ago, some polydactyl mutant managed to win the evolutionary tournament of reproduction, and we all had an extra thumb on the opposite side of our hands. Baseball gloves would look super weird, and we would have a duodecimal metric system where 100 cm could be evenly divided by three or six, but not five, and a foot would be 10 inches without changing either length.