Hmmm. I'm also in the UK, and in my experience people tend to say "500 mils" where I'd maybe expect them to say "half a litre". A can of Coke is straightforward (there's usually only one thing "can" can mean); bottles less so - is it a 500ml bottle, a 1 litre or a 2 litre bottle? I guess that's why people specify the volume. When it's something like wine we never specify the volume - a bottle is a bottle (albeit one that contains 750ml).
With carpentry, I was taught to measure in millimetres and it's metric when I buy stuff at B&Q but I take your point about 2x4s - it's become genericised, the actual measurements are metric but we continue to use the old naming convention,
You're right that people don't tend to
talk about using 120ml of milk, but that's what most recipes use - we just don't tend to talk about our kitchen adventures that much! "Cups" tends to be used when people are following US or older British recipes. (I find "cups" a PITA because all my mugs/cups are different sizes, and I'm a bad enough cook at the best of times without allowing imprecise volume to interfere with my culinary expertise. I usually google the metric equivalent when faced with cups).
That said, there's a strong tendency in the UK to resist metric - beer is still sold in pints (instead of the mighty 600ml "pints" our cousins down under get to enjoy) and speed limits are still set in MPH instead of KM/H. And over the past few years it's become increasingly hard to find litres of milk in supermarkets. Silly supermarkets - pints are for beer
(Ideally 600ml pints...)
thats what i mean, common people dont use measurements
EG
"500ml coke bottle" = small bottle of coke
"90mph speed" = "i was doing 90"
digressing away from common slang and going back to the rebuttling the OP, most people prefer bottom up measurements
0,1,2 instead of 0 tenth of 10, 1 tenth of 10, 2 tenth of 10
grams, ounces, tonnes instead of millitonnes or microtonnes
as for stuff like millimeters and centimeters, people do not treat it like what mathematicians do EG 100th, 1000th. (an adjective to describe measurements top down). they think of it as a common word (a noun to make reference to a known and publicly used term)
EG ask a kid what a millimeter is. they will never tell you its 1000th of a meter. they will say it is this big: l
EG ask a kid what a centimeter is. they will never tell you its 100th of a meter. they will say it is this big: lllllllll
again they will tell you there are 10 millimeters to a centimeter and 100 centimeters to a meter. not 10ths 100ths.. those terms of top down are reserved for 'professionals' and inside classroom textbooks.. not common on the streets in normal conversations
.. and thats about as many different ways as i can try explaining to the OP and other mbtc lovers that they need to be thinking common man slang and thinking of futureproof words using bottom up, not temporal measures using top down
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