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Joined:
September 2012
Posts: 813
Location: Thredbo, NSW, Australia | d'ovation - 2017-01-14 5:36 AM
Canada it's really confusing because although the SI system is officially used many people especially elderly ones with low literacy like to use terms like inch, foot, gallon, mile; but some of them are associated with the US and others are from the UK so you can never really be sure how much anything is until you clarify if they refer to the US or the imperial system.
Down here in Australia we converted from Imperial to Metric in the 1970s. This was after I'd left school where we were taught using mostly Imperial and a little Metric.
Although there was some pain involved for my generation and those before with the conversion, it was worth it in the long run. The metric system is just so much easier to work with. Now the only measurement that I use that isn't metric is a person's height. Don't know why. |
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Joined:
February 2016
Posts: 1836
Location: When?? | @Mark In Boise - "A Californian shouldn't poke fun at anyone about distance or direction. They express distance in reference to time and most, but not all, of the highways start with "The"."
Yeah, that's the CA savvy slang. But I, like you, also come from the Intermountain West, and I know it drives everyone back home (Salt Lake) nutty when I state distance in time. I guess that part of California dialect comes from the larger cities where miles don't really mean anything since the traffic only creeps along half of the time anyway, so the matter usually boils down to how much "time" they are going to be stuck in the car instead of how far. Though here in the backwoods of CenCal we still zip right along, and anything "yonder" is still part of the understood yokel. The reason for the "The" prefix is because most of the freeways here are named after people or locations, so it's simply called "the" Eisenhower, Nimitz, Harbor, Long Beach, etc. Then some people get a bit more abbreviated and use only the highway number, like "the" [insert number here]. At least most people are still detailed enough to give the direction of travel. |
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Joined:
October 2014
Posts: 270
| We northern California folks generally don't use "the" except for a couple of, named Bay Area exceptions (Nimitz, Bayshore) If anyone refers to I-5 as "The 5", we immediately know they're from SoCal. Another hint, never say "Frisco". If you're in the greater Bay Area, simply say "the City" and you'll sound like a local.
We also discuss weather in terms of altitude. Here in the Sacramento area we get no snow but "1.5 hours away" and 7,000 feet higher they can get 10 feet or more in a matter of days. |
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A Question About Scale Length...
