A Decimal Inch
Surprise on the back of a tape measure
Sewing adventures continue, but unfortunately I’m having far too much fun to chronicle how much fun I’ve been having. Here’s something adjacent, both to that and my previous post.
It turns out you need a whole bunch of things besides fabric and a machine to make anything, some more critically than others. Some of those I have bought specially—most notably scissors—but many others I acquired in the form of a cheap sewing kit in order to short-circuit the part of my brain that would obsess over finding the best quality seam ripper (and then be afraid to use it for fear of causing unnecessary wear). In the form of tired/wired/inspired, or perhaps an abridged version of the American Chopper argument meme:
- A bad workman blames his tools
- Quality tools can actually be a significant help and working with inferior equipment can even be a hindrance to learning
- Any old hammer will do if you’re not mastering carpentry
In this kit turned out to be a tape measure. I had actually bought a nicer one separately, but that was metric-only and the reverse of this one had what seemed to be inches. Despite my afore-stated position on imperial and US customary units I still filed this away in my mind for when I inevitably needed such an item.
More recently a flatmate and I were talking about display sizes, which is one thing that is measured in inches here.1 Their own tape measure (metal retracting carpentry type, vs the tailors’ I’m talking about) was metric, so while they were doing the conversion to get the size of their existing screen I rushed to grab mine… and proceeded to get embarrassingly wrong results.
I had previously noted two Chinese words by the measurements that were now causing me grief. I couldn’t transcribe them at the time, but they have since proven to be 市寸 and 市尺; I keep failing to learn any language that isn’t English and so the best I could do was vaguely recall that 市 had something to do with ‘city’, while waving my phone camera at the characters suggested that 尺 might mean ‘ruler’ (as in measurement, rather than leader). Perhaps I should have looked deeper, even just at the markings which clearly divide the units into tenths rather than eighths and sixteenths. Oops.
As should be apparent 市寸 is the ‘Chinese Inch’, or cùn/tsun, defined (at least in this case, there are other definitions because there always are) as being 33⅓mm or more than 30% longer than what I thought it was. No wonder I was so far out, I wasn’t the target audience for these bonus measurements and had just blithely assumed they were what I was already familiar with. Those tenths are important: the 市尺 (chi) marks appear every ten 寸, as part of a whole decimal system that I was completely ignorant of.
The upshot is a) I don’t actually have anything that measures inches longer than a foot (but I can just do the conversion if I really can’t avoid the things); b) if I ever do need to measure something in the market system I have A Thing For That (very satisfying); and c) I need to stop myself coveting a better quality version like this one (a result of the same acquisitive impulse mentioned above, and which makes having Things For That satisfying in the first place). Hardly a big issue overall, and a funny story.
While I’m here, while browsing for other items I recently saw a store listing for cotton batting (intended to fill quilts) which was 100 inches wide, “Sold by the metre”. Truly, commerce brings us miracles.
The Wikipedia article on the process of metrication in New Zealand currently claims without a citation that this is a regression starting in the 1990s, and speculates that the practise might not be strictly legal. If you’re a law graduate looking to get your name in the newspaper with a frivolous lawsuit maybe you should find out?↩︎