It’s not necessarily malicious – given general humour in this country, it’s likely he wanted to lose weight and asked his friend to text him that daily as a form of motivation.
Edit: however, I’d like to point out that consensually being sent that by a friend is fundamentally different to having abuse thrown at you by a stranger on the internet for your body shape.
Yes. The Brits still use a few non-metric measurements at times. In fact, it was America’s British heritage that got us Americans into the bad habit of using imperial over metric in the first place.
Haha I don’t think it’s about fear. It’s probably about having hundreds of years of using those measurements, and it being very baked in to the language used between people to communicate.
Nobody wants to have to translate between kg and stone all the time. It’s tedious. If you live in a country where all your interactions are going to be in one measurement then you’re probably just going to go along with everyone else.
Even down to ‘goin down the pub for a pint’ being a commonly used phrase which doesn’t have the same ring when it’s '‘goin down the pub for a half litre’.
That’s the thing, they do use kg. So it is not something they don’t know about. Just that stone for people’s weight specifically somehow is still in use.
For the pint, I do not think it is about the volume when someone says that. As of they are only going to drink one anyway?! Replace it with beer and it is a perfectly normal thing to say.
Stone only makes sense for people used to pounds, shillings and pence. For instance, “This costs 3 pound, 4 shilling and 8”, and, “I weight 12 stone, 6 pounds and 3 ounces”.
We don’t exclusively use metric in the UK. We use a hybrid of the two. Most of the comments that “get on Americans’ case” about it are likely coming from continental Europeans and other countries which do use metric exclusively.
I didn’t say the US did… I’m explaining it in a way Americans would understand, because they use feet but unusually don’t use its weight equivalent, and ask in comment sections wtf a stone is (bit of a funny role reversal considering it’s usually US units people are asking wtf they mean)
It’s pretty much just the UK and Ireland that use it, and even then, it’s only used for weighing people, boxing, and horse racing.
A lot of people just say their weight in kg, stone is used less and less as older people die out.
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