Petrified to be Metrified

It is unmistakably clear then the American people have not accepted the metric system. Every other nation on the face of this planet has seen fit to accept it, or at least force it upon its people. But America is a different sort of nation. It doesn't force that kind of thing. Go easy on the people, don't make them hate numbers. No, we didn't give in so easily. Why not? Was it paranoia?

The biggest surge ahead that metrification ever had was during the latter years of the Cold War, under President Jimmy. But it failed to make it over the top, and instead slid back down into the abyss. The communists still had us busy making bombs and rockets, and maybe we were afraid that if we switched over that our bombs wouldn't work, or wouldn't fit right, or that we'd spend too much time looking for the wrong wrench to even make the damn things in the first place. Or maybe the bombs would only be 0.06523 times as powerful because somebody goofed on a conversion. Or maybe the rockets would fly to Hollywood.

Or was it innumeracy. Few Americans are illiterate, but how many are innumerate? Maybe a lot; most are dreadfully afraid of numbers (and of April 15th). We have the IRS to thank for that. Add this line, subtract that line. And then this metric thing was supposed to be easy. In the late 1970's he plethora of pencil cups, rulers, lunch pails, keychain ornaments and high-heel shoes that had metric equivalents printed on them scared off the Mr and Mrs Joe Average. One glance at the equivalent of one quart counted as liters, or how many inches were in a kilometer, threatened to make everyone return to pre-school activities and never mind the IRS. Or was it the IRS that was afraid that people would get so metrified by the petrick system that they would refuse to fill out anything except form 1000?

No, it was none of these, I dare to say. It was English and the American way we speak it. Ounce, mile, pound, quart, inch, pint, yard, dram, foot, all of these are simple one-syllable words. Kilometer, milliliter, centimeter, kilogramÑthese are all huge words that don't just roll off of the tongue. They take a concerted lingual effort. Maybe it is possible to take a kilogram of sugar 21 kiometers to Aunt Jessie's with a liter of gas, but what do you do about an ounce of prevention being worth a pound of cure, inching along a crowded freeway, going the extra mile, a pound of flesh, giving an inch and having Ôem take a mile, and all the rest of our references to those cozy warm units?

The fault was in the language. The exhalted commission that studied the switchover to the metric system should have come up with a set of new one-syllable words for the metric units. They didn't, and ergo, they failed. The French don't accept foreign words, so why should we accept words from the French? We should have been taught kems (km), mogs (mg), koogs (kg), mims (mm), cims (cm), mets (m), gims (gm), lats (l), mals (ml) and I suppose even hax (for hectare, whatever the heck it is). After these new words would have taken hold it would have been easy to adapt them to those old familiar expressions:

1. He went the extra kem.
2. Give him a mim and he'll take a kem.
3. A gim of prevention is worth a koog of cure.
4. I was once a 44 koog weakling. (98 still needs to be converted from pounds to koogs, of course, since a 98 koog chap is not likely a weakling.)
5. Koog Cakes. (Did they ever weigh a pound?)
6. Two mets under (in his grave).
7. He hasn't a gim of sense.
8. I would't touch that with a 3 met barge pole.
9. We gave them the whole 9 mets.

And then instead of dreadful conversion charts, just put the metric measure of things right on the thing, with a little rhyme or story to make it fun to read and remember.

A coffee cup might say "It takes 120 mals of strong coffee in this here cup to get your job done, but you better drink it first."

Or "When you buy this book it weighs half a koog. After armchair reading it still weighs half a koog, but after bathtub reading it might weigh a lot more because it is not as waterproof as you are."

"Objects are a lot closer than they appear in the mirror because you have to measure them in cims now. About five cims make two inches."

So we're forever cut off from metrification because we can't handle long words that we didn't learn to spell in school (if at all). Maybe not. If America can play Globo-Cop, can export Hollywood Blockbusters, can get its language spoken in every nook and hamlet of the Global Village, there is still hope that the metric system will be a passing fancy and, eventually, everyone will see the beauty, the romanticism, and nostalgia, of thinking in Inches and Pounds. Give them that inch and they'll take the mile.