Ask Lemmy

As a kid, I thought mile, inch, and ton were all fake units of measurement that didn't have any actual distance attached. Just used metaphorically.

• An inch is a distance you can measure using your thumb and index finger (from the same hand)
• A mile is a distance you could walk, but would probably rather use a vehicle
• A ton is too much weight to even fathom lifting.

Then there's cup, ounce, and pint, which I thought were just words for containers that have an approximate size. Yard and foot to a lesser extent. Acre must've been a plot of land of indeterminate size.

Getting into cooking, I'm hating that teaspoon and tablespoon are a thing (along with a pinch and a dash). They don't even seem to line up at all with my tablespoons or teaspoons...I need to own special spoons that are labeled "tablespoon" and "teaspoon", otherwise the measurements will be wrong!

And given the unit conversions of all this junk, I'm not convinced my former understanding is much worse than reality.

I live my life two fifths of a kilometer at a time.

Serious answer, in italian it still uses miles

I think since it was a reference to a drag strip it was translated as a quarter of a mile everywhere else. At least where I live we use metric and we still call it eight mile, quarter mile and half mile when it comes to drag events

The movie I saw in Australia had the quote exactly as is. I'd like to think most of us recognize that a mile is a bit longer than a kilometer and that those distances are common in drag racing, so they're referred to as is. If we were measuring distance from driving to another city it's in kilometers and miles aren't used.

Tape measures have centimeters and inches on them. If I'm using approximations I might use inches and Subway has probably been the main reason Aussies know of inches and a foot.

If I'm doing any scientific measurement like building a cabinet etc, it's mm and cm.

In Malaysia we use both metric and imperial even though we only learn metric in school, so ehh it's still quarter mile

402.335 meters. Just round it down. 400 meters at a time.

Offtopic: The expression "Give someone an inch, and they'll take it a mile" is 得寸进尺 in Chinese. 寸 is Inch, 尺 is Ruler. So I guess its "Give someone an inch, and they go the distance of a ruler"? Its either 12 inch / 30 cm? Or is it 1 meter / 1 yard (ya know, those big rulers)?

Or maybe we should just say "Give someone an inch, and they'll steal your ruler?" 😆

But anyways: I think most movies just literally translate the words so they don't have to do conversions.

The metric system is the tool of the devil! My car gets forty rods to the hogshead and that's the way I likes it.

.402336km at a time.

There is a modern-style (awful-UX) site that gathers phrase translations, via opensubtitles.org and other sources. Examples for German:

Ich lebe sowieso immer nur für die nächste Kurve.
"I always only live for the next curve anyway"

ich lebe meinen Leben in Viertelmeilenschritten.
"I live my life in quarter-mile steps."

Ich lebe mein Leben in Halb-Kilometer-Abschnitten
"I live my life in half-kilometer sections."

Polish:

Żyję szybko i nigdy nie patrzę dalej, niż na pół mili.
"I live fast and never look farther than half a mile."

Przeżywam moje życie w niesamowitym tempie.
"I live my life at an incredible pace."

Moje życie to te krótkie chwile na trasie.
"My life is those short moments on the road."

żyję od wyścigu do wyścigu.
"I live from race to race."

Which ones are official? Dunno, it doesn't say. The more literal ones are probably subs as opposed to dub CCs.

15 more languages are available but I don't understand them enough to check an automatic translation. It's not needed now but you need desktop mode to see the "view in context" button and instead of an account, I use a custom CSS file to unblur the bottom examples.

It wasn't, not really important to the plot? If it was half a mile or mile nothing would have changed. I have no idea how many bananas is it.

Haven't seen the movies in German so I can't tell you what exactly he says. But distances in miles are generally kept in miles for German localisation (except for VERY rare cases), using the German word "Meile". Especially when it's not actually about a physical distance but vibes. We may not use miles to measure anything but we still have expressions like "meilenweit gehen" (to walk for miles, i.e. a very long distance) so it's not like we don't know what a mile is.