• Omgpwnies@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    14
    ·
    10 hours ago

    Mixing metric and imperial is base-tier Canadian.

    Sure, we will measure our height in feet/inches, except on our driver’s license, and weight in lbs, except at the doctors office. We’ll measure our car’s speed in km/h numerically, but if you hear a Canadian say “miles per hour”, it also means km/h, unless we’re talking about driving in the US, then it is actually mph…maybe.

    Now, ask a Canadian how far away something is.

      • Omgpwnies@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        2
        ·
        6 hours ago

        Nope!

        Some explanation though, Canada adopted the metric system and converted to metric in the 70’s-80’s. I remember seeing street signs in imperial and signs advertising the conversion (“50mph is 80kph” and stuff), so a large portion of our population spent a good chunk of their lives on imperial, or grew up with those people as parents. So, what happened is, the signs changed, and our speedometers changed, but people’s brains still went “this is miles per hour”, and well, it kinda stuck.

        Now ask me how far it is from Toronto to Ottawa…