Oh yeah, I use that. But not really as a unit of measurement per se, more just “Until you hit the next cross street”, rather than any actual measurement. And it’s relatively recent - for the longest time I’ve been using “Streets” instead, ie, go four streets down then hang a left.
I’ve been “Typing” for a long time mostly because I opened up wikipedia to see if a block had an actual number value attached to it. The answer is annoyingly non-specific!
In New York, the people who actually think in or use blocks and mean something by it literally differentiate “crosstown blocks” from “blocks” and only use them in Brooklyn and Manhattan.
Oh I totally get this,even more broadly than just the city, pretty much any travel at all I think of in time not distance. It takes an hour to get to work by car, four hours to go to my folk’s house, 12 hours to visit my sister in Indiana, unless I fly then it takes four. I can ballpark driving distance on the highway because 1 hour = 65ish miles.
Yeah. How far a “block” is changes on what city you are in. I guess also N-S blocks might have different lengths in the same city as E-W blocks too.
I guess it is a more vague measurement, too. Like “within a few blocks” means “local to this area” rather than a specific measurement. But I don’t think I’ve even met an American who doesn’t think in blocks to some extent, nor ever navigated an American city without considering blocks myself.
Re: grades. Canadians do this to, but with a light twist. You’ll never hear a Canadian say “When I was 8th grade”, they’ll instead say “When I was in grade 8”. This is incredibly consistent and it’s the only distinction.
Otherwise we behave exactly the same.
I think @SkeleRym nailed it when he said it’s because it’s standard throughout the US. You start Kindergarten at 5 or 6 depending on your birthday and graduate 12th grade at 17 or 18 accordingly, and it’s pretty much the same in every state.
Interestingly enough, when I’m in Manhattan, the length of a block changes depending on which direction you’re walking. Sometimes I specify street blocks vs avenue blocks.
I’ve heard it as “Long blocks” and “Short blocks”, though it’s apparently rarely used that way, since it’s usually clear from A)context, and B)the fact that you’re usually looking right at the fucker anyway.
They usually do, a lot of cities on a grid use rectangular blocks rather than square. And layouts can get a little weird, too - like, a Melbourne block is 100 by 200, but everyone acts as if they’re 200 by 200, because the blocks were originally square and were then split by much smaller streets that were added later.
scores
fortnights
furlongs
“So, Scott, how long are you away for?”
Starts furiously flossing
A fortnight is just two weeks. It’s not hard.
Beat me to the joke 
Now here’s an interesting one re Grades.
Americans and Canadians think in grades or occasionally in years. But that’s always calendar years, not ages.
So if I hear something happened in 1996, I was automatically 6 years old, despite for about half of that year, that wasn’t true. Same for grades, if something happened in grade 9, then I was automatically 14, despite the fact that again, for half that year, I wasn’t 14.
Every single person I’ve asked about this does this, even in one extreme case, a friend who was born on Christmas day. So even though he was the age he thinks he was for like only 1% of the year. In his memories he was that age, all year.
It’s like we all internalize our birthdays to be new-years.
Weird.
Many of my engineers speak/think in fortnights. Seriously. I’m not joking. They use it commonly as a unit of measure. Probably because it lines up with our sprint length.
I’m from a country that uses (mostly) British English my dude, I know what a Fortnight is. “Flossing” is one of the most popular and arguably most well known dance emotes from the 2017 Battle Royale game “Fortnite”, with the joke being predicated on the idea that the two words are homophones, which is two words that sound the same, but have different meanings.
I know the dance. I didn’t know it was called flossing. I thought you were furiously flossing your teeth because you had a lot of time to wait for me to calculate fortnights.
I’ll be honest, I’m hardly an expert on dancing, I just know it because there was a Fortnite dance stage at PAX, and more than one person caused issues by flossing too hard and railing the person next to them right in the nuts. Someone else laid out their mate by dabbing too furiously. I predict the next PAX Royale will just be a lit-up fortnite branded dance stage and we see who survives.
Agreed. Imperial can be useful in some limited applications, were a fastener needs to be slightly smaller or larger depending, but those are extremely limited, and if you’re in that situation then A)you’re likely in production and will own a set of appropriate tools, or B)You’ll have the skills to make them if it’s that important. Cut the shit, manufacturers, just make everything metric or at least metric-compatible.
As far as time goes we should all sit back and think about how fucking complicated that gets between weird human-invented bullshit around it and the physics at extremely high speeds or great distances. Time’s ugly.
Makes me think of the old way of thinking about age in Japan, where you’re “one” when you’re born, then you “age up” on New Year’s Day. So if someone is born on December 30 they’re two years old January 1.
Man, what kind of video you working on?