Metric or English?

If you use the excellent Google Maps you may know that they have a distance measurement tool which tells you the length of the line you draw on a map. Very clever and useful. But the choice of units is between Metric and “English”. Of course what they mean by “English” is “the old units still used in the United States of America, where they speak a kind of English”.

In England, it’s true that road distances are expressed in yards and miles. This is despite the fact that in 1965 the British government announced its intention to complete the process of metrication within ten years. Speedometers and roadsigns are still imperial. Maps, and almost all other weights and measurements encountered in daily life are expressed in metric units, and this is enforced by law.

Informally, the story is very different and in everyday speech it is very common for people still to use the old imperial measurements. As metric units have been taught in British schools since the mid 1970′s, this is very curious. By now, only the aged should still be talking about pounds, inches, feet, stone and other archaic measurements. And they should be receiving blank stares from anybody under 35 years of age. The fact is that school children are bilingual – they learn the metric “language” in school and the imperial one at home. And not just from their parents. Television persists with imperial units when they should be playing a part in completing the metrication process started so long ago. I know we import a lot of films and programmes from the United States, and they don’t look like joining the rest of the metricated world any time soon, but home grown media output should have dropped imperial measurements decades ago.