I am going to defend imperial (and other ancient) units of measurement. The metric system is unintuitive but standardized. The imperial system is intuitive bu

I am going to defend imperial (and other ancient) units of measurement. The metric system is unintuitive but standardized. The imperial system is intuitive but (traditionally) non-standardized. A standardized but unintuitive system is useful in modern science and engineering, where reliability and precision are of utmost importance. An intuitive but non-standardized system is useful for day-to-day communication and conceptualization, where a standard deviation away from the average of the unit's reference does not have a meaningful effect. Before standardization, many old units of measurement could be immediately related to everyday things, making conceptualization simple and intuitive. Examples: Imperial pound of mass: A pound of wheat berries is more or less how many wheatberries I can fit in my hand. I deal with wheat berries and my hands every single day - I can quite concretely conceptualize a pound and more or less relate that pound (of wheat berries) to other things: a pound of meat, a pound of wool, etc. Imperial acre: An acre is more or less the amount of land that a pair of oxen can plow in a day. In our old little village, oxen and farm fields are something we observe every single day, and so an acre is conceptually intuitive to us. Ancient cubit: This is more or less the length of my forearm, which again serves as a very useful reference point for measuring and conceptualizing things. Say I go to build a cabinet. I may measure in cubits. Then, when I go to cut lumber, I just measure it with my forearm, cut, and that's it. Imperial hogshead: I speculate this barrel size is more or less either the size of an ox's head, or can tightly fit one inside it. Again, this is an animal I might observe daily, making conceptualization simple. Note that a standard deviation of the size of an average man's hand or forearm, or of the amount of land a given pair of oxen can plow on a given day, does not have a meaningful impact on how I use and relate these units of measurement to everyday life - I'm not precision engineering a space telescope here. I'm just buying wheat berries, plowing fields, and building cabinets. Contrast these origins with metric's. Metric meter: "one ten-millionth of the distance between the North Pole and the Equator through Paris" - whoa get me outta here! I can't relate that to anything I encounter in my day-to-day life. Metric gram: "the mass of one cubic centimeter of water", or "the mass of one cubic 'one hundredth of one ten-millionth of the distance between the North Pole and the Equator through Paris' of water" Of course we can still more or less relate these metric units to things in our day-to-day life for better conceptualization, but because they're arbitrary, they don't map 1:1, whereas imperial and ancient units were naturally emergent rather than arbitrary and they mapped one to one per their definitions. This is why imperial is a more useful system for relaying measurements colloquially, for everyday life.