Quote:
Originally Posted by VydorScope
[...]Do Australians switch between the two in daily life? Do your characters? Does your target audience? If so then yes, else probably not.
You could always do "well over 80 meters" or drop the measurement completely and say something like "towering over most houses and buildings."
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Certainly avoiding the problem is my first choice, but that's not always practical.
My main protagonist is an adult, but he's still much younger than I am, and so I wonder if his education might be such that metres feel more natural to him than they do to me. I was in school during the change-over, rulers had both measurements on them ... and many tape-measures at least (it's a long time since I bought a school 1' ruler) still do today. I grew up in a world where both systems were in use and I find it difficult to gauge how it is for others now that metric is more firmly established. Use of terms can also vary with trade: in school we were encouraged to use centimetres (as the closest thing to inches) but I notice many trademen talking in "mils" (millimetres) - even for quite large measurements ("2300 mils" instead of "2.3 metres"). Time to go looking for friends of the right age group and upbringing
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I suspect that, if nothing else, the American influence here is strong enough that most people remain familiar with terms like feet, and miles and so on. More particularly, I wonder how American audiences find reading books that use metres and litres and so on. How much does that distract from your reading?