Quote:
Originally Posted by VydorScope
I think these days most Americans are used to 2 systems existing, but only think in feet/inches. My son is in 3rd grade and they are still teaching feet/inches/etc as the primary measurement... but for some reason we buy our soda in liters! Milk, juice, etc is in gallons/quarts... but not soda. It is the only exception I can think of.
I am a scifi author so I use metric system in my books, and most scifi seems to use metric. So genre of your writing is a bit of a factor. I would suggest avoiding a mix though as many readers will think it was a mistake.
100 feet = roughly 33.33 meters so you could say "many tens of meters"?
|
I just had a thought, how about
: "four score metres or more"?
I find both the soda bottles and your scifi comments very interesting. The fact that scifi uses metric (not something I'd particularly noticed as distinction before, I don't read that much of it these days) suggests that at least the American audience is not going to be totally lost by its use (or not all of them), which is reassuring.
And you're right about the genre being an issue. I agree generally with HarryT's comment about a book being written for where it is set. But there is a distinction between using the language of the specific characters, when the character is speaking, and the language of the story itself. When a story spans the globe it seems arguable that the external language (the omniscient story-teller, or the narrator as applicable) should normally be consistent throughout. Also, most scifi and fantasy is about the story or idea rather than the setting, this doesn't always give the author carte blanche, but it does change the emphasis considerably.
I'm writing a contemporary fantasy story. Being contemporary it should, I guess, be written for where it's set - except in this case it (eventually) spans the globe, so I revert to my idea that the telling should be consistent wherever I happen to be at the moment. But not all the characters are exactly human or of this period, and so things can get a bit mixed. While it is possible to set about creating custom measurement systems for the non-human characters that adds an additional layer of complexity that adds little to the story (at least not in this case), and so I believe it is best avoided, which leaves finding something that will be acceptable to my audience. But even that is not simple: under traditional publishing my first audience would have been Australian, but with ebooks and possible self-publishing it may well be that my (hoped for) audience could be American or UK or anywhere.
(I think I'm just obsessing over this to distract myself from the difficulties of moving forward in my story.
)