Should Europeans say "i saw this coming from kilometers away" instead of miles?

[Unit1]

or nah or doesn't matter?

[Effably]

No. We also use miles.

However we keep everything in increments of 10/100/1000 so on.

So a Kilo (thousand) meter is unsurprisingly 1000 meters.
A mile is 10 kilometers. Or 10 000 meters.

Comparatively an American or English mile is 1609 meters. Or 5280 feet. Which are both just really awkward.

So a European mile is roughly 6.2 American miles. You guys really should officially convert to metric soon. Anyone doing any work with units already use it.

[Red_Arrow]

So you want us to convert to metric (meters) but you will stay with miles.

[Effably]

Rather I am suggesting you accept the Scandinavian Mile as the only one with a real function and purpose! Alternatively, we all remove the mile as it is obsolete.

I mentioned we use it in Europe because pretty much every country has their own mile and length for it.

There is an English mile, a dutch Mile, a Roman mile (what you and the English are trying to mimic), an arabic mile, a hungarian mile, a scandinavian mile, an Irish mile, a Scottish mile and so on.

It is a horrible unit of measurement because you always have to specify which country's idea of a mile it is and then pray the other person knows what it is in metric so they can convert it to their own concepts of distance. Is it the Chinese 500m? The Dutch 1.8km? The English 1.6? The Hungarian 8km? The Roman, 1.4-2km? The italian? The... You get the idea.

These were good measurement once upon a time when walking and amount of steps was precise enough for most things. However even back in the Roman days it was just what simple people used as it had no real application outside of conveying the general idea.

[Syntosi]

Does not really matter since its a figure of speech. That said, I have heard people use kilometers instead of miles so maybe the transition will happen naturally in the future regardless.

[AngryCarl]

Surely the only Europeans who say miles are the British? We will never recognize the kilometre, which is shorter than a mile and therefore clearly inferior.

[Unit1]

Fair point 🙂

[DryGermanGuy]

We use time for this saying. Translated back into English: „I saw this coming for a long time.“

[bolverk]

In the UK we'll still say "I saw this coming from mile away" even if the Government change the the road signs to Kilometers from Miles.

[DrPepper12]

No. I like colloquialisms of foreign languages and arcane words. Seeking purity in language is something only the French do

[exitseven]

I think they do say that

[handsomelad70]

I'm a Canadian. Should we say it?

[Anonymous]

Yes I guess they should.

[Anonymous]

😆😆😆