We don't have to print as many characters on our speed limit signs. That's something, I guess. Also, Farenheit is more intuitive for everyday weather. Other than that, I much prefer the metric system. Physics uses it essentially exclusively.
Americans, what's so great about the Imperial System?
- Thread starter Amaror
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Speaking as a writer, the imperial system shows its advantage in language. Imperial units tend to have fewer syllables, and are much punchier and easier to work with, while metric units, kilometer in particular, can be extremely awkward or cumbersome to use in a lot of situations. And then there are the many common phrases based on imperial units. "Give them a centimeter, and they'll take a kilometer" is comparatively not a pleasant phrase to read, write, or say, and even one as simple as "inching along" is valuable for building good sentences.
I prefer the metric system for most things, I rarely ever use the Imperial system, I have a learning disability in mathematics so doing measurements with the imperial system is really hard for me.
The Imperial System was brought over to the States with the colonists and we have kept it because it costs real money to switch over to metric measurements mainly because of reprinting books and getting people to adopt something new that will not feel as intuitive because they did not grow up with it. Along with re-education we have lots of manufacturing applications where we would have to redo/make new marking dies for tools along with cross reference items to do quick conversions between legacy Imperial System and the modern Mettric system. As such its generally been treated as to much of a hassle to switch over just for the sake of switching over.