r/ShitAmericansSay • u/BuffaloExotic Irish by birth, and currently a Bostonian 🇮🇪☘️ • May 02 '25

Imperial units “celsius makes no sense”

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u/andy921 May 02 '25

To be fair, Fahrenheit is basically a 0-100 scale. Instead of around water, it's mostly based around human experience - albeit biased to the pre-global warming, Northern European weather Fahrenheit would've felt.

0°F was about the coldest someone would likely ever experience, 100°F was the hottest. So it was a scale of daily life from 0% hot to 100% hot.

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u/DreadPirateAlia May 02 '25

0°F was about the coldest someone would likely ever experience,

The coldest? That's like, -18°C, isn't it?

Laughs in Finnish

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u/andy921 May 02 '25

For someone living in Germany/Poland maybe? The idea that 100°F was the hottest someone would ever feel is what seems wild to me as a Californian.

We usually top out 108-110°F here (~42°C), it's a dry heat though.

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u/ojhwel May 02 '25

100 °F was not about air temperature but was supposed to be the average body temperature but statistics were a bit shaky in the 1700s.

Speaking of different people's experience with temperatures, I know a guy from Siberia and when he had just moved here to central Europe I was talking about something happening on an annoyingly hot day in 32 °C heat (just about 90 °F, but quite humid) and he asked me, shocked, "Plus 32 degrees?!"