So TIL. I have never heard of this, and I’m not sure if this happens in the U.K… I had always assumed, growing up with feet and inches and metres interchangeably, that area is always stated as the length of the side squared is how it is done. Has this happened as a mis-advertising tactic to make things sound bigger than they are?
Comment on xkcd #3065: Square Units
Donjuanme@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Always bothers me that I can’t trust 90% of people (myself included) to properly state area, square feet or feet squared, very different scales.
waz@feddit.uk 3 weeks ago
Donjuanme@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
I think square feet is popular because many things dealt with aren’t squares, but a square foot is generally small enough to be a good measure, while also large enough to not be an unreasonably large number. When square feet are too small we move to yards (meters), acres, hectares or miles.
A house or apartment isn’t usually square, so how would you apply feet (or meters) squared to it? While a property line might well be equally long on each edge, so you might see it in feet squared, but also that number looks A LOT smaller, so you’ll often see square feet or meters
waz@feddit.uk 2 weeks ago
I was briefly fascinated by ‘chains’ at school, in the system of rods, links and chains. The idea of chains was you go around the outside of an irregular area and the number of chains related to the area in acres. 1 acre to 10 square chains?
SpaceNoodle@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Square feet are feet squared.
Donjuanme@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
3 square feet are 3 1x1 feet, 1/3rd of a square yard. 3 feet squared is a square yard, 3x larger than 3 sqft.
Unless I’m missing your sarcasm.
Also the purpose of this xkcd
SpaceNoodle@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
I believe “feet squared” and “feet, squared” is the discrepancy here.
Donjuanme@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
"the Louisiana purchase added 838,000 square miles to the United States, tell me, was it 1/4 the size of the United States, or the 100x the surface area of the sun?
One of those are square miles, the other is miles squared.
But I don’t know why I expect you to understand this now.
Donjuanme@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
No need to add the comma if you say it properly, feet squared are not squared feet, quantifier (3) adjective (square) noun (feet) vs quantifier (3) noun (square) affective (feet), it’s the order of operations in the English language, one is quantifying the distance of the edge, while the other is quantifying how many individual edges (squares) of set distance (feet) you have.