Interestingly enough for distances we would not say '200' for yards and '10'
for miles but we do 'go unitless' on speed - eg 'We topped 140' - with the
colloquialism extending to 100mph being called a 'ton' (do km countries refer
to a ton like that?). However most of our (long) distance signs
In January 2009, I wrote an article in the UKMA's Metric Views, suggesting that
we have to make metric 'user friendly' if we want to get people to use it in
every day speech. This may mean accepting various colloquialisms. This is an
excerpt from that article, and reinforces what Ezra has just
Ironically, the same line of reasoning I came up with for using millimeters for
the garment industry leads me (perhaps surprisingly) to the conclusion that
centimeters are actually the right submultiple of the meter for specifying
human height.
So, for instance, I would imagine law enforcement