It blows our hivemind that the United States doesn't use the ISO 216 paper size standard (A4, A5 and the gang).
Like, we consider ourselves worldly people and are aware of America's little idiosyncrasies like mass incarceration, the widespread availability of assault weapons and not being able to transfer money via your banking app, but come on - look how absolutely great it is to be European:
The American mind cannot comprehend this diagram
[Diagram of paper sizes as listed below]
ISO 216 A series papers formats
AO
A1
A3
A5
A7
A6
Et.
A4
Instead, Americans prostrate themselves to bizarrely-named paper types of seemingly random size: Letter, Legal, Tabloid (Ledger) and all other types of sordid nonsense. We're not even going to include a picture because this is a family-friendly finance blog.
I want to only briefly defend the NA system in terms of naming. I get it, I worked in printing for decades, I know how shitty it all can be. But Letter and Tabloid communicate well for something that is otherwise all the fault of press guys.
I’m thinking it lets a tray run out, then you ask it to print on a certain size of paper, and in response it asks for more of that size paper. Then you know which exactly it’s out of. Good for an office too where you don’t know who printed what.
Well, one still could do it like how many countries transitioned to the metric system: slap the traditional names onto things that are actually now defined by the metric system, like how China's catty, about 0.60478... kg, became 0.5kg. Just slap "Letter" onto A4.