Bring Back Imperial Units! A Cranky Editorial

Friday, September 12, 2025

Bring Back Imperial Units!
A Cranky Editorial

After a recent discussion in the comments, it all began making sense. We’re in our collective pickle today because we’ve discarded the imperial system of weights and measures. That is, the system that was adopted in this country just as the British government was codifying a reformed version of it. The version we adopted was greatly simplified, thus freeing up our minds to engage in online political screaming and yelling.

The imperial system is what gives the United States its idiosyncratic everyday usage of miles, inches, pounds, feet, acres, degrees Fahrenheit, and so on. There is an even more extravagant set of traditional imperial units that are largely forgotten, largely gone from everyday use—unfortunately!

As we’ve learned from recent decades in which pocket supercomputers do everything for us, our minds have too much time on their hands. If idle hands are tools of the devil, idle minds must be the equivalent of Satan’s supervisory committee and senior executive council.

Unburdened as we are by having to look up stuff in paper dictionaries, in local library card catalogs, or printed on intricately folded paper maps, our minds are free to surf social media looking for people more fortunate than ourselves, angrier than ourselves, stoopider than ourselves—all for the sake of cascading dopamine and serotonin hits. Our brains and attention spans are liberated from mundane tasks, but they demand to be entertained nonstop. The method of entertainment is frequently rage, and it’s mainly socially self-destructive.

The slippery slope to here was forgetting the incremental units of imperial measure. We’re no longer engaging our minds with attempts to remember how many feet, yards, or furlongs in a mile (5,280; 1,760; and eight, respectively). We don’t try to eyeball distances in terms of fathoms or cables, chains or leagues. We don’t consider drams, fluid ounces, pints, and pecks. We’ve almost entirely lost track of stones, hundredweights, hogsheads, and scruples. It goes hand-in-glove with our loss of connection with the physical world.

Freed from the burdens of perceiving reality, our minds have gone rogue. What are they thinking?

“What’s that weirdo on Facebook getting all those likes for?” That’s what we’re thinking. Because it makes us mad or jealous to think it. Anger and jealousy are ways to pass the time by feeling emotionally engaged. Wouldn’t it be better to wile away the hours contemplating that an acre is neatly characterized as the area of a rectangle one furlong wide by one chain long?

We should spend more time learning what our forebears knew: the difference between a barrel, a butt, a tun, a tierce, and a rundlet.

Wikimedia: creative commons license

We aren’t giving our minds enough to do in sizing up the physical world around us. That’s what lets us lose ourselves in the virtual worlds of online time-wasting. That loss has progressed and made us crankier. Reviving the intricacies of all the imperial weights and measures might serve to bring us back into reality. A farthing for your thoughts?