Timeline for Would Americans say: "He sat down 9 feet from me." or "He sat down 3 yards from me."?
Current License: CC BY-SA 4.0
55 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
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| Aug 9, 2021 at 23:59 | comment | added | CJ Dennis | @jamesqf Yeah, time measurements are a good point! How easy/hard is it to remember how many days there are in a month? How many weeks there are in a month? Etc. | |
| Aug 3, 2021 at 16:29 | comment | added | jamesqf | @Panzercrisis: Perhaps you misheard, or perhaps it's a localism, but the saying is "six OF one, half a dozen OF the other", meaning there's actually no difference. | |
| Aug 3, 2021 at 16:26 | comment | added | jamesqf | @CJ Dennis: While that's true, many of us live in cultures that don't always work in base 10. Often we work in base 2 (and not just if we're working in tech :-)), using halves and quarters of something, as with liquid measure, or in carpentry. Other times we work in base 12, buying things by the sixpack or dozen, or dividing the year into 12 months, the day into 24 hours... | |
| Aug 3, 2021 at 13:18 | comment | added | Panzercrisis | As for the phrase I mentioned above - "Six is one; half a dozen is the other." - maybe it was local to the Southeast, and it may also be slightly archaic: It just means that the difference is trivial at most. But again, I had just never thought about this before basically, and the answers probably are right in saying that feet are the preferred measurement by default. | |
| Aug 3, 2021 at 13:17 | comment | added | Panzercrisis | If this were closed earlier, I'm glad it's reopened. It's one of the cases on this site where even within the same version of English, native speakers' eyes are opened. Personally I had never sat down and thought about this, that I can remember; but seeing the answers basically saying, "Use feet by default, yards by exception," I can tell by experience that they're probably pretty accurate. As a native AmE speaker, my eyes were opened, and so were those of probably some other native speakers. | |
| Aug 3, 2021 at 0:00 | history | tweeted | twitter.com/StackEnglishLL/status/1422346606574178307 | ||
| Aug 2, 2021 at 15:37 | history | reopened |
EllieK Rayan Khan Glorfindel♦ |
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| Aug 2, 2021 at 13:10 | review | Reopen votes | |||
| Aug 2, 2021 at 15:37 | |||||
| Aug 2, 2021 at 12:56 | comment | added | EllieK | A question with 18 upvotes and 100+votes on the answer is closed as 'opinion' based. All supporting information in the answers indicates this is not opinion based. No one uses Yards in the U.S. unless it is for a specific reason. Grow up ELL children. | |
| Aug 2, 2021 at 11:55 | comment | added | Spratty | @jamesqf - my sincere apologies; when I read your comment I somehow thought you meant "length" as in the length of the track. I completely missed the "length-as-in-of-a-horse" meaning, and I can't explain why. Call it a comprehension blind-spot on my part. Now I read your comment again, with hindsight, it makes perfect sense. | |
| Aug 1, 2021 at 17:15 | history | closed |
ColleenV FumbleFingers mdewey Brian Tompsett - 汤莱恩 fred2 |
Opinion-based | |
| Aug 1, 2021 at 6:40 | comment | added | CJ Dennis | @Panzercrisis A search for "Six is one half a dozen is the other" returns results for "Six of one half a dozen of the other". | |
| Jul 31, 2021 at 13:21 | comment | added | CJ Dennis | @mcalex Why should the world be 40,000,000 m in circumference? That value is purely arbitrary! However, once you've got your first arbitrary value, dividing it and multiplying it by powers of 10 makes it easy for a culture used to thinking in base 10. | |
| Jul 30, 2021 at 21:41 | comment | added | Panzercrisis | Americans would say, "Six is one; half a dozen is the other." 🙂 | |
| Jul 30, 2021 at 21:22 | comment | added | chux | Can one fathom the difference in using yards vs. feet? Is that twice as hard? | |
| Jul 30, 2021 at 21:09 | comment | added | Kevin | @mcalex: This question is specifically about American English. In American English, "meter" is both a noun and a verb, and "metre" is a spelling error. | |
| Jul 30, 2021 at 20:22 | comment | added | jamesqf | @Spratty: I meant length used as a measure of distance, as when it's said that the winning horse won by X lengths, or by a head or nose. Or for another example (perhaps unique to the US) the recommended following distance on the road is one car length for every 10 mph speed. | |
| Jul 30, 2021 at 17:22 | answer | added | nathanaelps | timeline score: -1 | |
| Jul 30, 2021 at 15:53 | answer | added | Eric Hoy | timeline score: 1 | |
| Jul 30, 2021 at 11:49 | comment | added | Spratty | @jamesqf - 'Length is not a standard distance, though, but approximated by the size of the horses'. I'm not sure what you mean there - horse-racing courses in the UK are measured in miles and furlongs (a furlong is 1 8th of a mile; 220 yards) - absolute measures and nothing to do with horses. Unlike the Space Shuttle SRB's of course, the width of which is absolutely to do with the width of a horse's backside. God, I hope that story's true. | |
| Jul 30, 2021 at 8:05 | comment | added | mcalex | @CJDennis arbitrary? perhaps the choice of what was used for the measurement, but the metric system is based on the natural world, not the current ruler's dimensions. @ jamesqf Apart from the first word, I don't disagree with anything you said, but when the first US dictionary guy deliberately spells words differently to the language origin - even accusing the English of corrupting the English language(???) - then it's not me that's wrong. :-) | |
| Jul 30, 2021 at 2:35 | comment | added | jamesqf | @JosephDoggie: Length is not a standard distance, though, but approximated by the size of the horses. (Or cars, or whatever you're racing.) And the cup may be a standardized unit in the US, but not when you're buying coffeemakers and such, where the coffeemaker's cup is about 1/2 of a standard cup - or the cups most people drink from. | |
| Jul 30, 2021 at 2:32 | comment | added | jamesqf | @mcalex: Wrong! It's just US vs British spelling, where US almost always uses 'er' at the end of a word, where the British use 're'. No different from US 'or' vs British 'our', to take a common example. | |
| Jul 29, 2021 at 22:56 | comment | added | Issel | "He sat about 10 feet away" would be what Americans would say. | |
| Jul 29, 2021 at 19:55 | answer | added | Mike Vonn | timeline score: 3 | |
| Jul 29, 2021 at 13:08 | comment | added | Aaron F | @HagenvonEitzen "metro" is also a form of transport here in Spain :) | |
| Jul 29, 2021 at 12:10 | comment | added | JosephDoggie | Feet is more common, unless you're playing football -- that is American football -- as opposed to soccer. And horse racing uses furlongs and 'lengths', etc. | |
| Jul 29, 2021 at 7:11 | comment | added | Hagen von Eitzen | At leat "meter" matches the spellings used in German "Meter" (and Dutch), but "metre" is closer to the "original" French "mètre". The Russian "метр" is on the fence and the Spanish "metro" is considered a means of transport elsewhere. Perhaps we should ask Liberia and Myanmar for their opinions ... | |
| Jul 29, 2021 at 7:09 | comment | added | anotherdave | @dan04 I think Mari-LouA knows that cup is a standardised unit in the US, but the trouble is that it's also a standardised unit in the UK with a different volume! So if you're following a recipe you have to look up the provenance of it & see if the person is using US fluid ounces or imperial fluid ounces. At least with grams & mililitres you know where you stand :) | |
| Jul 29, 2021 at 7:00 | comment | added | Weather Vane | @PCLuddite indeed your gallons are smaller than Imperial, so your cars use a lot more of them (although that's not the only reason). | |
| Jul 29, 2021 at 5:29 | comment | added | CJ Dennis | @mcalex Metric is also completely arbitrary, it just doesn't take as much to memorise. | |
| Jul 29, 2021 at 4:04 | comment | added | PC Luddite | @DawoodibnKareem Americans absolutely use meters. Just not for everyday life. Anything remotely technical will inevitably use metric. I guess we just didn't feel like it was either necessary or worth the cost/effort to change the rest over. And for what it's worth, the US customary system (us does NOT use the imperial system) is legally defined in metric units. | |
| Jul 29, 2021 at 3:45 | comment | added | mcalex | 'Meter' is the act of measurement (hence ohmmeter, multimeter), metre is the unit. Unlike some countries, God is clever enough to deal with homonyms ... Cups are metric, too (1c = 250g/250mL). @jamesqf what the heck is 'human scaled'? :-D. Imperial measurements are arbitrary - the human in question is whichever king decided the distance from his elbow to his extended middle finger was a 'cubit' | |
| Jul 29, 2021 at 2:48 | comment | added | RonJohn | @CJDennis "litres" looks like "litters" to me... :) | |
| Jul 29, 2021 at 0:07 | comment | added | CJ Dennis | @RonJohn The American spelling of "liters" always looks to me as if it's pronounced "lighters". Only "litres" looks like "leeters" to me. | |
| Jul 28, 2021 at 22:18 | answer | added | djheru | timeline score: 5 | |
| Jul 28, 2021 at 19:36 | comment | added | Lambie | In any case, sit and sit down are not the same thing. Which do you mean? [re the meters: I spell it meters when writing for a US audience.] | |
| Jul 28, 2021 at 19:12 | comment | added | dan04 | @Mari-LouA: In the US, a “cup” is a standardized unit of volume equal to 8 fluid ounces, where a fluid ounce is defined as 231/128 in³ (29.5735295625 mL) when referring to the contents of a container, or 30 mL exactly when referring to the serving size on the nutrition label. The number of grams depends on the density of the ingredient. | |
| Jul 28, 2021 at 18:57 | answer | added | Chad | timeline score: 6 | |
| Jul 28, 2021 at 15:27 | answer | added | Phil Perry | timeline score: 6 | |
| Jul 28, 2021 at 12:45 | comment | added | Matt Timmermans | 3 feet, 5 feet, 10 feet, 15 feet, 20 feet, 30 feet, 50 feet, 75 feet, 100 feet, 50 yards... or something like that | |
| Jul 28, 2021 at 10:06 | comment | added | PatrickT | "five paces yonder" | |
| Jul 28, 2021 at 10:01 | comment | added | Tim | If I were gonna say “3 yards” I’m pretty sure I’d actually say “a few yards”. | |
| Jul 28, 2021 at 4:56 | comment | added | jamesqf | @Kirt: Even most (former) military and scientists (and I'm both) only use metric in work contexts, or a few others like the size of wrenches you use to work on your car. Elsewhere we use the much more human-scaled everyday units. | |
| Jul 27, 2021 at 22:25 | history | became hot network question | |||
| Jul 27, 2021 at 17:06 | answer | added | SoronelHaetir | timeline score: 43 | |
| Jul 27, 2021 at 15:43 | comment | added | Michael Harvey | How do you know a modern American wouldn't say 'three metres'? | |
| Jul 27, 2021 at 15:34 | answer | added | EllieK | timeline score: 48 | |
| Jul 27, 2021 at 15:13 | answer | added | Kevin | timeline score: 11 | |
| Jul 27, 2021 at 14:41 | comment | added | FumbleFingers | If the speaker was going to use feet, he'd almost certainly round it up to ...ten feet/foot from me (or a dozen). But with yards, he'd probably round down to ...a couple of yards from me (or a few). In such contexts, excessive precision means little, and tends to look odd. | |
| Jul 27, 2021 at 14:35 | review | Close votes | |||
| Aug 1, 2021 at 17:15 | |||||
| Jul 27, 2021 at 14:27 | answer | added | Jeff Morrow | timeline score: 10 | |
| Jul 27, 2021 at 14:20 | history | edited | Rayan Khan | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
deleted 2 characters in body
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| Jul 27, 2021 at 14:19 | review | First posts | |||
| Jul 27, 2021 at 14:20 | |||||
| Jul 27, 2021 at 14:15 | history | asked | user140203 | CC BY-SA 4.0 |