So, the other day, 198cm popped up. I think someone was talking about a new basketball player, one of those giants, or maybe it was an ad for something, I don’t quite remember. But the number stuck with me. 198cm. My brain just doesn’t quite register height in centimeters, you know? It’s all feet and inches for me, especially for people. It’s like trying to guess the weather in Fahrenheit when you’ve only ever known Celsius. My mind just goes blank.
So there I was, needing to get a proper feel for this 198cm. What’s the first thing I did? Like most people these days, I reached for my phone. No more rummaging around for a dusty conversion chart or, God forbid, wrestling with the math on a piece of paper. Though, if I’m honest, a tiny part of me misses those little mental gymnastics. Sometimes.
This whole conversion business, it actually brought back a memory. I was trying to buy a jacket online a while back, from some European site. All the sizes were in centimeters, naturally. I remember sitting there, trying to puzzle it out, and I guess I messed up somewhere. The jacket arrived, and it was just a bit too tight across the back. Couldn’t really wear it comfortably. Annoying, right? All that fuss for a few centimeters. That definitely taught me to be more careful. You can’t just wish fabric to be bigger.
Anyway, back to this 198cm. I typed “198 cm to inches” into the search bar. And just like that, the answer appeared. Easy.
The actual nitty-gritty, if you ever need to do it yourself, isn’t too bad. The number you gotta remember is 2.54. That’s how many centimeters are in one inch.
So, the steps I usually follow, or would follow if my phone wasn’t around, are simple enough:
- You get your centimeters – in this case, 198.
- Then you just divide that number by 2.54.
My phone told me it was 77.95-something inches. Let’s just call it around 78 inches to keep things simple for now.
But see, even 78 inches… it’s better, but it’s not quite there for me when I’m thinking about how tall someone is. It doesn’t give me that instant picture. So, the next thing I always do is change those inches into feet and inches. That’s the way my mind really gets it.
We all know there are 12 inches in a foot.
So, I took that 78 inches (or 77.95 if you want to be fussy).
I divided 78 by 12.
Okay, 12 goes into 78… six times, right? 6 times 12 is 72.
So that gives me 6 feet. And then you have 78 minus 72, which leaves 6 inches.
So, 198cm is pretty much 6 feet 6 inches.
Now that makes sense to me! That’s tall. Definitely proper basketball player height. You can really picture someone that tall.
It’s a bit strange, isn’t it, how we get so used to certain ways of measuring things? I was chatting with a buddy from overseas the other week, and he was just baffled by feet, inches, pounds, the whole lot. He was saying how the metric system is so much more logical, and, well, he’s probably got a point. It’s definitely more straightforward, all tens and hundreds. But what can I say? Old habits, they just stick with you. It’s like my old man, he still occasionally talks about prices in the old currency from way back when, even though it’s been ages!
This whole 198cm thing actually reminded me of something else. A while ago, I was trying to help my nephew put together this model airplane kit. He’d gotten it as a gift, and it was one of those fancy European ones. All the instructions, every single measurement, was in millimeters and centimeters. He was so frustrated, kept sighing and saying, “Why can’t they just use inches like everyone else?” I had to sit down with him and explain that “everyone else” isn’t always who you think it is, and that different places do things differently. We spent a good chunk of the afternoon with a ruler and a calculator, converting everything bit by bit. It was a bit of a pain, to be honest, but also a good little lesson, I think. For him, and for me too, actually. It really makes you think about how much we just take our own familiar systems for granted, without a second thought.
So, yeah, that was my little adventure with 198 centimeters. It started with just a number, then a quick tap on my phone, a bit of mental math to really nail it down in a way that clicked for me. And it all just proves, I guess, that while numbers are universal, the way we make sense of them, that’s a whole different story. It’s personal.
