Measurement

America is still completely wedded to the imperial system of measurement, and even if the whole world ends up going completely metric, I'm quite sure they will never change. (Who cares what the rest of the world does, anyway?) No American has any idea what a centimetre or a kilometre is. Distances are measured in miles, lengths are measured in feet and inches (even down to small, precise measurements like an eighth of an inch), the weight of everything is expressed in pounds, and liquids are measured in gallons.

I have mixed feelings about this. Like most British people of my generation, I grew up in a strangely conflicted environment, where I learnt about (and did calculations in) centimetres, litres and kilograms at school, but talked about inches, pints and pounds at home, because my parents and grandparents only really thought in these terms. Indeed, they were still only just recovering from the shock of adapting to decimal currency, and my grandmother never really accepted the fact that 10p was 10p and not two shillings. But there was no real choice about this for me: the old system was entirely obsolete by the time I was going into shops and buying things, so I only ever learnt about it second-hand (and imperfectly). But in other areas of life this was not the case, and even now I can only conceptualise height expressed in feet and inches, distances in miles, speeds in miles per hour, and drinks in pints. As for weight, I don't really understand that at all, and to this day remain hazy about whether a pound or a kilogram is heavier.

Which, you would have thought, should have set me up well for life as an American: but it's not that simple. The imperial system is endlessly complex, and incorporates several units which are pretty much obsolete, or only reserved for specialist uses, in either or both of the UK and America: furlong, pole, perch, gill. A gallon, for example, is something I previously associated only with buying petrol - here, it's used for mineral water, milk and orange juice too, so I can now, for the first time in my life, visualize a gallon in terms of size. On the other hand, the stone (as a unit of weight) is not used here, so I am forever trying to divide by 14 in my head whenever somebody is referred to as weighing so many pounds.

The ubiquitous use of the imperial system in America has its benefits: there is none of the confusion between generations or even within one individual which exists in the UK; everyone knows and understands one system. It has even resulted in certain accepted terminologies to describe things beyond the units themselves: a 'two by four', for example, is a standard size of wooden plank measuring two inches in height and four in depth (and varying in length according to need); everyone in America knows what this is, but I had to learn. But, as Europe worked out some time ago, the system is horrendously complicated and fiddly, and its retention here is one of the principal things which makes America feel a little old-fashioned and complacent to me.