On Tue, 21 Jul 2020, at 17:00, Tony Thigpen wrote: > It's all perspective and how precise you need to be. And what we are > measuring. > > The only thing I know that is measured in yards is cloth and football.
What about "the whole nine yards"? > In home improvements, boards and such are measured in feet,inch,16ths. > That is it. Not yards,feet,inch,16th. In the UK, stuff is now labelled in cm or mm, but actual sizes of many things haven't changed. And timber sizes are often nominal anyway, eg the size of something before it was planed or sawn. What used to be an 8 foot by 2 foot board is typically now sold as 2400x600. > When driving down the road, it's all miles or 1/10 of a mile. We don't > say Mile,yard,feet,inch,16th. On motorways etc the countdown markers to where a slip-road starts were supposedly at 100 yard intervals. A quick google suggests they are "at about 100 yard/metre" intervals now, so goodness knows what the actual distances are. But it hardly matters for the purpose of seeing one's approaching the start of the slip. And incidentally both 1/16 and 1/32 were easy to work with (eg in DIY with timber) being, if you like just a bit more and just a bit less than 1 mm. On the other hand if you were machining metal you'd likely have been working in "thou" ie thousandths of an inch. Apparently USAians call that a "mil" - which must be easily confused with millimetre. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thousandth_of_an_inch -- Jeremy Nicoll - my opinions are my own. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to lists...@listserv.ua.edu with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
