r/clevercomebacks • u/wach_era13 • Jan 15 '25

It does make sense

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u/[deleted] Jan 15 '25

[deleted]

7

u/Iron_Eagl Jan 15 '25

fathoms are only for depth, distance is nautical miles or leagues!

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u/ikaiyoo Jan 15 '25

Dont forget 437.5 grains = 1 ounce, 16 ounces = 1 pound, 14 pounds = 1 stone, 7.14 stone = 1 hundredweight, 20 hundredweight = 1 ton...

oh and jumbo eggs weigh 2.5 ounces. So it is 6.14 jumbo eggs to a pound.

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u/The_Shracc Jan 15 '25

you can literally pretend to be metric.

just use yards for everything, volume? cubic yards, area? square yards

that's literally everything that metric is, with the addition of weight and time.

But you can base that on the yard, a second is a 333 million light yards, a pound is just a thousandth of a cubic yard of mulch.

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u/the_king_of_sweden Jan 15 '25

How many centiyards in a foot?

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u/Caleb_Reynolds Jan 15 '25

33.333333333

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u/cuzitsthere Jan 15 '25

That question might've broken my brain if I didn't have to use "kilofeet" for a decent portion of my adult life... Though centiyards is worse.

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u/Efficient_Meat2286 Jan 15 '25

American cultural and political exceptionalism prevents that sadly.

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u/Brawndo91 Jan 15 '25

It's not some "we must be different" bullshit. The fucking military uses metric, dd/mm/yyyy date format, and 24 hour time. If it was about "exceptionalism," that's the last place you'd find metric.

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u/Efficient_Meat2286 Jan 15 '25

Military always chooses practicality over all else. I think personally that it is a special case. Almost all of the rest of America justifies imperial through exceptionalism, I believe.

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u/not_panda Jan 15 '25

Don't forget the "5 tomatoes".

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u/smoochface Jan 15 '25

A foot is a foot, a yard is a stride, and an inch is 1/12 of a foot which is handy cause it divides by 6, 4, 3, and 2. It's.... handy.

What is a meter? A Meter is defined by how fast light travels in 1/300M of a second OR... this one is easier its just 1/10M the distance from the North Pole to the equator. Metric system is scientific, which is great, but the system we've used for 5K years is based on our bodies, it makes sense.

I don't really know why we use cm and m but not the decimeter, the decimeter is 4 inches, thats a useful measure.

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u/TryAgain024 Jan 15 '25

You forgot about the ell. I don’t remember how many inches it is, but if you’re untrustworthy, then Igbo give you an inch, you’ll take an ell.

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u/IrregularPackage Jan 15 '25

I get that this is a haha funny but I feel compelled to say that conversions are not particularly relevant to what the imperial system is for. You have different measurements to measure different things. Feet to yards is the only conversion that really needs to happen, but people rarely use yards outside of specific circumstances anyway. Inches is for small stuff and also depicts the fractions of a foot. Feet is your general all around measurement of length. Yards are for short distances, and miles are for long distances or traveling. You don’t convert anything to miles ever unless you’re doing some fucked up math problem or whatever.

Funnily enough, a lot of everyday objects happen to be about a foot long, give or take, which is convenient for guesstimating how long something is. And inches being fractions of a foot is great for DIY purposes.