I have noticed a frightening trend with items for for sale with sizes given in “imperial” dimensions and not metric. The most obvious of these include televisions, ceiling fans and a particular line of bread roll! Each of these, and many others, are always advertised in “inches”. Now I grew up with the imperial system and for a number of years struggled in a drawing office dimensioning in yards, feet and inches. When Australia went metric in the 1970’s I was ecstatic, no more dividing by ‘3’, ‘12’ or ‘36’ just need to move the decimal point and put in the necessary prefix. Hooray! I then set out to make myself fully understand the metric measurements and ignore those archaic ‘imperial’ dimensions!
It is now getting close to 50-years later and I find I am trying to grasp how big is a 56" television, is it really big? Why is this happening? Is there not a rule that stipulates that as Australia is metric that anything dimensioned should shore it in metric first and foremost and if really necessary imperial is small print?
Does anyone else have this problem with the proliferation of ‘imperial’ dimensions?