>>>>Talking about imperial. In the UK we use a unit of stones, usually for a person's weight. A stone is 14 lbs. So a fairly heavy person may be 16-17 stone. But it's hard to envisage when you guys say "220 - 240 lbs"
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>>>16-17 stone doesn't sound so bad, does it? ;-)
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>>Well to us that's a guy who's letting himself go to seed. 18 st and he's maybe a super-heavyweight boxer or more likely a couch potato (hope I'm not treading on anyone's toes here).
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>The parenthesis depends on how many stones you weigh :).

By the way, we don't put an "s" on the end, so it's "18 stone in weight"

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>As to how do various measures sound in real life - despite what I heard here, that metric just doesn't fit in the language - I find metric easy to understand and at times quite colorful.
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>I've heard of "club 100" - guys over 100kg. You can oder "kilo i sifon" - a liter of white wine and a siphon bottle for soda, to make a spritzer (*). Your height may be "meter and sixty" (160cm), "meter seventy" (170), or "meter and a razor" (below 150), "dvometraš" - two-meter-guy. If you're extremely lightweight, you "ain't got fifty kilo with bed" (since you like brevity: nema pedes kila s krevetom). When I was a kid, they sent me to grocery to buy "pet deka kvasca" (5 decagrams of yeast). All short and nice.

I've never heard the metric "deca" or "deci", or "hecta" being used at all. In the UK practically everything is sold in metric weights, but they tend still to use roughly the same size packaging, so a traditional 2 lb bag of sugar, say, may be sold as 0.9 Kg (not sure as not got one to hand). Most Brits would still ask for, say, 5lb of onions, though, as most shops are self-serve or self-pick, you don't often need to ask across the counter - just select as much as you need. Restaurants still advertise 16 oz steaks, etc.
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>(*) wine IS measured in liters or hectoliters (when in vats or barrels), but old winos prefer to order a kilo. "viči kilo" (yell a kilo) actually means "call a waiter and order a liter of wine" in drinkers' shorthand.

Wine and booze here is sold in litres, or in "bottle" size (c. 675 ml?). I enjoyed being able to buy a 2 pint bottle of Jack over in the States; although less than a litre the bottle looks bigger!