“I was stroking her with one hand while I was giving you the finger.”
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“Less chatter makes the profits fatter.”
A few seconds later, after laughter:
“I almost pee-peed myself!”
Said during game of Chinatown
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‘All right, you are a 400lb gorilla in the skin of a 7kg cat. Now can I come to bed?’
Compromise is a lovely thing, but not always comfortable as such.
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What confuses me here (besides the fact that a 7kg cat is quite a large cat) is why giving the gorilla weight in Imperial and the cat in metric???
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People generally don’t know how much a gorilla weighs (to give an estimate in kg), but “200/400/800 lb gorilla” are well-known phrases.
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As in 200kg gorilla, perhaps?
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I’ve never heard it said, unlike the versions using pounds, which I have definitely heard many times in American media.
(200 lb gorilla usually refers to a human, 400 lb to a gorilla, 800 lb to a particularly large gorilla? Just guessing.)
Coming from a non-Imperial background, that’s the most common saying I’ve heard in Spain back in the day. Which I find normal, we only use metric.
So it would then make sense to bring the 400 lb gorilla comparison with a 15 lb cat, in an Imperial system, then?
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Can I interest you in the £800 Deluxe Executive Gorilla?
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I’ve heard the 400lb gorilla phrase but would weigh my cat in kg so I can understand why the mixed messages. My cat is 6kg by the way
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“It’s like the Goonies lied to us.”
My (50-ish) friend wishing she could go live in a cave with no humans around because this week is very busy. But caves with convenient treasure and sea views and no humans aren’t as easy to find as she would like.
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It’s like British people talking about temperature. You use F when it’s hot because the number’s bigger, but C when it’s cold, because then you get to use single digits/negatives.
Or why, despite having larger units like stone (well, Americans don’t …), you use pounds when you want to convey something being heavy.
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I have, to my knowledge, never expressed a temperature in Fahrenheit!
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Same. I think it’s mostly older Bristish people who’d do that. It’s one of the imperial measures that’s falling out of use because you’re unlikely to encounter it (unlike feet and inches for height, etc).
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I’m metric all the way in the UK.
Stones, pounds and ounces make so little sense. There’s 16 of one in another one, and 14 of one in another. Be quirky, be be consistent at least.
Same with yards/feet/inches.
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How are you on shoe sizes? Continental, or the old barleycorn-based measure? I find it more natural to think of myself as a size 11.
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I think all British people now use C for temperature, except possibly 100° F might still be a benchmark for a really hot day for some very old people.
Nearly everyone uses stones and pounds for their weight, I think, as in ‘11 stone 2’ - and the same for height in feet and inches, ie 5’ 8"
Places are miles apart. Yards and metres are pretty much interchangeable. Inches and cm are both used, depending on which is most useful at the time.
Food tends to come by the gram, and liquids are sold in litres, except for milk (sometimes) and beer (in pubs). Everyone knows what a pint is, but nobody uses gallons any more.
I love the apparent inconsistencies in the quirks of the imperial system. Yeah, metric is efficient, but it’s very dull.
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Yep, that matches my experience as a Brit. Degrees C for everything, no F. Americans use F for hot weather and I have to keep looking it up. 100F is 37C and that’s nasty.
If I’m taking my own weight it’s always in stone. Just about any other measure of weight is in kg. People’s height is always feet and inches (6’1).
This is pretty much exact for me:
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Unless you’re talking about fuel efficiency, which is miles per gallon. Oh, you want to buy fuel? Well naturally that’s measured in litres…
For weight, I’m now in the habit of using kg for everything, including people.
For height, I’m happy to use either. I used to always use feet and inches until I took up karate and all the gi sizes were in cm.
Shoe size I thought was an arbitrary number, until a colleague told about barleycorns earlier this year. I’d say it makes as much sense as the continental Paris points, except that there’s an offset in the imperial version and of course it’s different between the UK and the US.
I don’t recall the last time I heard anyone in the UK using Fahrenheit for temperature.
I’m glad that there are 100 pence in a pound. It’s wild to me that there were still 240 pence in a pound into the 1970s.
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I adore the fact that a litre is 10cm3 (can’t do cubed) and the weight of that cube of water is a kilogram.
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