If you weigh yourself in stone . . .

[ritaxis]

Do people who reckon their weight in stone have scales that report in stone? Or do they do the kind of strange arithmetic to convert to stone from pounds or kilograms?

I shouldn't be bothered by stone because I'm stuck with pounds, which is almost as ridiculous. I mean, everybody uses pounds here except when they don't, so I have to go out of my way to think about things in metric. I do, actually, play a sort of game with myself where I convert things when I don't need to, but it's not enough to make it easy when the world around me is stuck in a pre-revolutionary (French) mode.

Comments

[heleninwales.livejournal.com]

Our UK scales that weigh in stones do have stones and pounds on the scale. Mine is stones with 2lb divisions between. However, we are increasingly shifting over to metric and the doctor weighs me in kilos.

Regarding Imperial measures versus metric, I'm sort of bilingual, though I tend to default to metric for some things and old measures for others. Height and weight are things that I can picture if you give me the figures in feet/stones but not if you tell me in pounds or kilos. Cooking, however, doesn't matter. I use both, depending on the recipe. Anything scientific, it's all metric.

[ellarien]

Mine has stones (subdivided in two-pound increments) on the outer ring and kilograms on the inside one. Nobody here thinks of their weight in pounds any more than they think of their height in inches.

We started "going metric" when I was in primary school (and nearly everything is sold that way now), but the force of habit is strong and I think most people go back and forth as needed. I still think of my weekly meat or fish purchase as half a pound of whatever, even though it says 0.25 kg or thereabouts on the pack.

[davidgoldfarb.livejournal.com]

When I first joined 24-Hour Fitness they had a digital scale in the men's locker room. I'd go and weigh myself, and I noticed it had a button that switched among measurements. It had pounds, it had kilograms -- and it had one that said "16 sts 6". It took me quite a while to realize that "sts" was an abbreviation for "stone".

[papersky.livejournal.com]

As everyone said, British scales measure in stones.

So I have a Canadian scale, and it measures in pounds and kilos. So I know what I weigh -- 170lb, a bit under 80 kilos -- but that has no meaning for me, if I want to know what I weigh emotionally I have to convert it into stones -- and I wouldn't admit it, I'd be ashamed to weigh so much. As not going to the trouble to divide a number by 14 is easy, I only find out what I "really" weigh when I am in my aunt's house in the summer.

Weight, a fraught issue for many people!

[birdsedge.livejournal.com]

My British digital scale has three settings: pounds, stones and pounds, and kilograms. I can switch at will. I've always weighed in stones and pounds but since my doctor weighs in kilos, I tend to do the same now and only check the st/lbs thing every so often because I still think in 'old money'. (Showing my age. We decimalised our coinage in 1971, but the term 'old money' refers to any pre-decimal measurement for weight, volume, coinage etc.)

[birdsedge.livejournal.com]

BTW, the question should have been: 'Do you weigh yourself in stones?', and 'I shouldn't be bothered by stones.'

Stones not stone. If you're using it for colloquial writing purposes as a British-ism you need the s on the end otherwise you'll come over and not a native speaker. (Sorry for being pedantic if that wasn't a writing-related question.)

[ritaxis.livejournal.com]

Nothing to apologize for. I left the s off on purpose because I thought I had seen it that way, and I appreciate the correction.

[birdsedge.livejournal.com]

Hmm, yes, in certain usage you do leave the S off, but not in the above two. If someone asks you how much you weigh, you'd probably answer. 'I weigh nine stone ten.' In that instance you wouldn't add the 'S' even though it would be grammatically correct to do so.

English! Gotta love it!