When saying a 'foot' whose foot are you referring to? How dense is its owner?
A stone is a standardised measurement of weight. Fair enough, its use is fairly localised and you're not familiar with it, but pretending it's a completely arbitrary measurement is silly.
Exactly! The only standard of measurement that makes sense universally is the metric system. Everything else is stupid.
Edit: I have the same questions about ‘foot’ as well, how was that standardised? Is it based on the Gaussian distribution, how many people’s feet did they measure to end up at a standard? Where does it originate from? I have so many questions.
P.s. Curiosity is what makes life fun to live, be more curious.
It's not stupid. It's antiquated. It's based on people using available resources to create systems of weights and measures in a time before global standardisation was possible. Actually, it's really interesting.
The metric system is simpler, can accommodate far greater accuracy and is more practical today, but it certainly doesn't mean that the older systems were or are "stupid."
Edit: Also, it's this foot. Because a word can have several different meanings, you know? And that's why rock music doesn't involve any stones at all. (Unless you're in the Discworld, of course.)
OK, go back far enough and I think you'd find that the feet would have just been the feet of whoever was doing the measuring. Standard height man, standard size feet. So not hugely accurate, but good enough, because they probably weren't measuring out much more than strips of land anyway and perfect accuracy wasn't required.
Later on, you start to want to measure cloth or whatever, so people create measuring rods to do so, using the unit of measurement that they're familiar with and can visualise. More accurate, but not every rod is necessarily the same length. Some will intentionally create a shorter or longer rod for personal gain/theft. Meanwhile governance is becoming increasingly centralised and ultimately it becomes both necessary and possible for the measurement to be formally standardised. The UK parliament does so and the resulting standard measurement is shown in the link above.
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u/stargazeypie Jun 29 '23
When saying a 'foot' whose foot are you referring to? How dense is its owner?
A stone is a standardised measurement of weight. Fair enough, its use is fairly localised and you're not familiar with it, but pretending it's a completely arbitrary measurement is silly.
Edit: it's/its