This may seem like a silly question, but it's been bothering me lately.
In colloquial English, we have a lot of odd phrases & words that refer
to our customary/imperial system of measure. A few that come to mind are:
- Mileage
- Milestone
- Mile a minute
- Miles & miles
- Missed by a mile
- Inched forward
- Every inch a [blank], i.e. "every inch a king".
- Inch by inch
- Within an inch of
- The whole nine yards
The list goes on and on.
Both the beauty and difficulty of our language is how much of it is
culled from other sources. So what are we to do with such phrases?
Should we even trouble ourselves to their existence? With words such as
"mileage", is there a metric substitute such as "metreage"? It doesn't
make sense to me to say, "My auto has low mileage" when I'm not counting
it's use in miles. Should we start referring to project progress points
as "kilostones"? ;)
Cheers,
Mike
