Measure for Measure
27th March 2022
Traditional weights and measures emerged organically as responses to the requirements of human life. Just as scientific hypotheses are proposed to answer intellectual questions, so too are forms of life developed to answer the needs of life. In a reverse Gresham’s law, the good drive out the bad.
The foot, the mile and the pint are all human measures, emerging either from a human reference or for an understood human need. Unlike decimal systems, which can only be divided by 2 & 5, the old shilling — being 12 pennies — could be divided by 2, 3, 4 or 6. Such measures exist at the scale of daily life, and in a world increasingly alienated and atomised they help to bind us to the notion of place and dwelling. The pint is not simply an abstraction of fluid quantity: it’s a social activity, an anticipation and a pleasure.
One of the joys of being an American is that you don’t need to use the fucking metric system unless you choose to do so.