Actually that's a modern measurement concept based on the original meter. By using this concept, the size of a meter is tied to absolute terms in physics that "anyone" could measure with the right tools, while the original concept was based on a physical object called the meter, which is subject to many things such as heat dilation for example making it not accurate, and if the original object was lost we would not have a way to tell what is a meter (conceptually speaking of course).

The foot on the other hand (lol) is traditionally based on the king's foot size. This of course depends on which country (or realm?), and to make matters worst, who's the king at the time, because yes the official measure would change based on that too.

Of course that's not how it is today, but we can say the original foot was lost long ago.

[–] bloodfart@lemmy.ml 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Ditto for the original meter. We sure are lucky that an approximation of the measurement is built into the name of the foot. It’s frighteningly European to have a measurement name that roughly translates to “measure”

Hey, how many measures is that?

[–] brunofin@lemm.ee 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

honestly curious, as someone that doesn't intuitively know how long a foot (in terms of measure) is, does it actually compare to the average size of the average foot? Like if you say something is 2 feet long, can you actually walk 2 steps and that's a pretty good approximation?

[–] bloodfart@lemmy.ml 1 points 1 year ago

Its a tad low if you’re barefoot, frighteningly close when you have shoes on. For men’s average shoe sizes.

It’s a man’s man’s man’s foots world.