The intuitiveness of the imperial units actually don't demand much thinking from my American pea brain: an inch is about the width of my thumb, a pound is about the weight of how much meat/grain I can fit in my hands, a mile is about a thousand paces - it's actually quite simple and intuitive, which is perfect for a dumb stupid American like me.
I can't imagine doing something like woodworking without my brainlet system. Inches are a nice "bite-size" unit that fractionates quite nicely for cutting wood. They don't make me think too much. In metric, my thumb would be about 2.53 centimeters, the kerf of my saw is 1/8 an inch, and that's like 253/800cm as a fraction - yikes! An inch is a good whole number to start working from.
And then like - what's a centimeter even? It's one hundredth of one ten-millionth of the distance between the North Pole and the Equator passing through Paris. Woah - get me outta here! That's just too much numerology for me. And my brain can't relate to or conceptualize that. Again, because I'm just so stupid, and American. I have to stick to the simple stuff: thumb -> inch, pound -> fits in my hands, mile -> thousand paces, gallon -> 10 pounds of water.
About the thickness of your pinkie.
A kilo is about 1/2 a lb so it's not really wildly different.
> pound -> fits in my hands
> gallon -> 10 pounds of water.
How do you do 10 handfuls of water?
Not like that arrogant metric, for which he can find no useful representation...for some reason
A reason that is clearly about the utility of metric itself rather than one's constant use of imperial.
People living in metric countries have these sorts of “intuitive” relationships figured out. If you ever go to Europe, you will not see people anxiously furrowing their brows over their calculators to figure out how much things weigh or how far it is to the end of the block.
And, of course, there’s an XKCD for that: https://xkcd.com/526/