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”.
According to the questionable celebrity health statistics website I found… Danny DeVito is 70kg, which is 11 stone… So it’s more like the chef lost almost 1.9 Danny DeVitos. We Americans may have weird measuring systems, but we take them seriously!
Well I was in catering the owner was the taster and he didn’t smoke and drank only luke warm espresso in one gulp. I know because he explained it to me many times.
Yes very much so. There was this bakery I would go to when I was a teen who had the best chocolate chip cookies ever. The woman behind the counter stood taller than pretty much any woman I have ever seen and her obesity made me wonder how she could even stand.
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.
Obviously it’s different for everybody, but it worked for me. I lost over a hundred pounds after watching a comedy special where the comic ripped into fat people. It made me feel gross, and gave me the motivation/willpower to start losing the weight.
That won’t work for everyone so obviously we shouldn’t go harassing all fat people, but clearly “fat shaming” isn’t entirely worthless.
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