As someone not born to the metric system but who’s tried to lean into it, this is something I’ve always found a little difficult. “A thousandth of a meter” isn’t a useful concept to me. I don’t think we are good at conceiving of things in their thousands, with good proportionality. I would rather just have a singular name like “squajibbles” for milimeters and memorize an intuitive sense of what that is. I realize I can do that with the word “milimeters” too but my brain sometimes gets stuck on unpacking the math. I was reading Dune last night and the expression “millions of decaliters” really stopped me in my tracks. I felt like I had to start with one liter, a sodastream bottle, and multiply it up. I’d rather have some concept like “fuckajiter” which means an Olympic swimming pool and work with that.

Not really being critical here. Metric is better. But intuitiveness is one of the qualities of a measurements system that makes it more or less appealing and I’ve always found imperial has a slight edge there that makes it harder to just drop as a complete loser of a system.

EDIT: yes, internet, I know the only legal thing to say about metric / imperial is that metric is the only system and imperial is for American asshole cavemen. Oh well. Fuck me for offering thoughts from someone trying to move to metric. I should hide my shame.