Why say tonnes?

[greendress05]

When people mean “lots of” why do they write “tonnes of” and not “tons of”? Why bother making it an unspecified number of metric tonnes? I’ve even seen “a fucktonne” of. AIBP?

Yes.
Yes you are.

Oh no! I thought I’d find my people here. Anyone?

I don’t think they do, in general? I assume that when someone does use ‘tonnes’ as a vague idiom to mean ‘a lot of’, they’re probably just over-correcting, as in ‘Please revert to myself’, or ‘That would be myself, Lord Sugar’.

Ah yes… maybe it’s just an autocorrect thing. (I’ve just tried it and my phone seems happy enough with tons. Ho hum.)

No, me too. Used to edit academic papers and even they were doing the tonnes thing and were baffled when I queried whether the authors really meant metric tonnes 🙄

I'm old enough to have learned imperial tons but then we went 'a bit metric' and tonnes came in. I can't see that it matters whether you use tons or tonnes of anything. It just means a very large amount in the way OP is using it.

YANBP! The awful 'tonnes' in that context is part of a longstanding craze for 'modernisation' or 'zany' misspelling of perfectly satisfactory English words. For example - a fictional example, but telling - the popular British television series 'Coronation Street' included a corner-shop named 'The Kabin' (i.e. Cabin) - and this was possibly as long ago as the late 1980s.

What are children taught at school nowadays? Long ago I learned ounces and pounds and hundredweights and tons. Then we went metric and the butcher prices things per kilo and 100 grams and I do a little conversion in my head.

There will be factories in Britain which buy commodities in huge amounts. Do they do that in tons or tonnes? I will look up the difference between the two. Do we have a young generation who are completely used to thinking in tonnes and will naturally use the word tonnes?

1 metric tonne = 0.984 imperial tons. They refer to different weights - would you rather have 1 ton or 1 tonne of gold? It is not just a zany spelling.

👍🏾 I didn't make myself clear. A word in its own right but selecting it to replace the traditional 'tons' is an example of the above.

I thought it was one of those US vs UK things because Americans on the internet seem to always use tons while Brits use tonnes.

I use tonnes and learned metric at school in the 80s.

Yes maybe youngsters haven’t even heard of tons.

@MagpiePi if it’s referring to an actual weight then of course it’s reasonable to use tonnes. But as a generic phrase meaning “lots of” it seems really odd to me to make the generic word tonnes not tons.

Oh, right, I see what you mean!

Maybe it is that because everyone under the age of about 60 will have been educated in metric units so tonnes is the way they’d spell it if they heard it? Like ‘chester draws’ and ‘bone apple teeth’.

Yes, totally agree and have had this thought myself several times.

Saying something like, "I have tonnes of friends" is just ridiculous.

It's no more ridiculous than saying, "I have tons of friends", is it?

Maybe they are making a very specific distinction referring to slightly less amount of whatever it is

My children don't know what I mean if I refer to a "ton-y" to distinguish it from a ton but I'm sure thats what we said when metric tonnes first appeared on the imperial landscape

Why are you assuming it's being selected to replace tons? I use tonnes, grams and kilograms for weight. I use metres, km, cm, mm for length/height/distance except for people's height, for which I sometimes use feet and inches.

It would be a bit inconsistent if I used tons instead of tonnes.

My DD is horrified (now) that she was not taught any weights and measures at school, neither imperial nor metric.

Yes maybe youngsters haven’t even heard of tons.

Is anyone else re-writing this in a Jane Austen accent: "Perhaps the younger members of society have not heard of the ton."

I think my favourite misunderstanding of that was a blog post by a Regency romance reader who wrote about a literary hero, "Is he of good ton?" because she had completely misunderstood how to put it into a sentence.

Well in that phrase "tons" is just loose slang for "a lot", so there's no point converting it to metric when it doesn't imply any sort of precision.

It would be a bit like converting the phrase, "If you give an inch..." to "If you give a centimetre..."

I initially misread that and was wondering how someone in the Regency period could have written a blog. 😄

I find that very hard to believe. It's more likely she has forgotten doing it, I would have thought.

She only left school 3 years ago. They did centimetres, anything longer than a ruler... Nope. And no weights.

I have similar aged kids and they did measurements like km and weights (mass) like kg. Didn’t your dd do any science GCSEs with questions like speed= distance/time or maths GCSEs with volume or density calculations ?
My kids had questions that might involve an accelerating car (km/h)

Surely she couldn't have taken GCSEs in maths or the sciences without coming across measurements