Arcane food-related vocabulary

Yeak but then I’d need an easy conversion from just pounds to stones & pounds. American body weight just in pounds is as meaningless to me as kilos.

I’ve never heard the “gill” measurement word pronounced - and lo and behold I now have read that it’s pronounced dzhil- i.e. with a soft g. So no fish were harmed in the measurement of libations. Good to know. :eyes:

My allegedly native language …

Yes, soft g. Pronounced exactly as the female name Jill.

OPSOMANIA: https://wordsmith.org/words/opsomania.html

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I’m a bit late to this, but this is certainly not the case. I’ve been dealing with UK babies since 2002 and they have always been weighed in kilograms and grams. Families of laypeople (never medical) want to know the conversion to lbs and oz. But any medical calculations will be made from metric measurements.

I had a boss that said I was worth my weight in gold. It was about $612 an ounce then.

I worked with some Aussies and Kiwis in the past and the line I heard was, 5’10” or 6 feet tall sounds so much better than 1.77m or 1.88m. No one says or wants to be 1.88 meters.

In any case, one of my favorite terms (and it applies to food) is buttload, a traditional measurement for liquid.

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And look at the price of gold now. :slightly_smiling_face:

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Thanks for the correction. It’s a goodly while since we had a baby in the extended family. My niece, who finished uni a couple of years back, was a pounds and ounces baby, as I recall, so you must have been in it pretty much from the start.

I remember a British high school teacher saying that some measure (can’t remember what it was) was as useful as “Furlongs per fortnight” .

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There was an extra credit question on a beginning physics exam: “What is the speed of light in furlongs per fortnight?” The winning answer was expressed in hexadecimal.

AI is your friend: The speed of light is exactly 1A3F4CEDB000 furlongs per fortnight in hexadecimal.

The calculation is as follows:

  1. The speed of light is defined as exactly 299,792,458 meters per second.
  2. The conversion factor to furlongs per fortnight is approximately 1.8026 x 10¹² furlongs per fortnight.
  3. The exact value for the speed of light in furlongs per fortnight is 1,802,617,499,785.3 (a repeating decimal if using the approximate furlong definition, but it is an exact value when the meter is defined by the speed of light).
  4. Expressed as an integer number of furlongs per fortnight, this value is exactly 1,802,617,499,785.3, which when converted to hexadecimal is 1A3F4CEDB000. (Note: the number is an integer in the FFF system where c=1.8… x 10^12). The conversion from the decimal value 1,802,617,499,785.3 to hexadecimal gives 1A3F4CEDB000 (after rounding for display purposes as a clean hexadecimal, the precise conversion yields a close, manageable value).
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Yes, sir!

A lot, if not most medical stuff in the US is done metrically as well. At least among the staff. I’m sure it gets converted when appropriate.

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If this were a radio broadcast, your AI friend would no doubt qualify for a Peabody Award for that answer!

I like that analogy, and am stealing it! Like a crow leaves mementos at a bird feeder, here is a quote from comic actress Jennifer Coolidge: “I’m so swell, I’m swollen!”

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Ah, now I get it! JK. Well done, I think.