The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #129826   Message #2917461
Posted By: Bill D
30-May-10 - 09:02 PM
Thread Name: BS: xxl trousers needed (UK)
Subject: RE: BS: xxl trousers needed (UK)
I did some searching, Kevin...asterisks & bold type mine. Maybe another generation? (I suppose 14 'feels' smaller than 140)

"Although the 1985 Weights and Measures Act[5] expressly prohibited the use of the stone as a unit of measure for purposes of trade (other than as a supplementary unit), the stone remains widely used within the United Kingdom and Ireland as a means of expressing human body weight. People in these countries normally describe themselves as weighing, for example, "11 stone 4" (11 stones and 4 pounds), rather than "72 kilograms" in most other countries, or "158 pounds" (the conventional way of expressing the same weight in the United States and Canada).[6]

Its widespread **colloquial** use may be compared to the persistence in the United Kingdom of other Imperial units like the foot, the inch, and the mile, despite these having been supplanted entirely or partly by metric units in official use and other contexts. Thus on a National Health Service Web site the user may select either metric or Imperial units,[7] but the law requires that if this information is officially recorded, then such records shall be in metric units.[8]
"