The Metric System verses Whatever We Americans Use.

Okay people. It is the end of February and we are less than a month away from Spring. (Imagine a trumpet fanfare at the sound of that lovely word.) This morning it was 20 degrees outside. I’m not talking about Celsius either! 20 Celsius is something like 70F or 87.34F or maybe the surface of the sun for all I know. Hey, I’m American. We don’t get that whole metric system thing. A system based on tens? That is just crazy! Zero as the freezing point of water and 100 as the boiling point? Come on! That is just silly. Everyone knows that 32F is the freezing point and 212F is the boiling point. It makes perfect, logical sense. (Please note the rampant sarcasm implied. Please also note that sarcasm plays a key role in this whole blog.)

Having the same name for the basic unit of measurement is just plan lazy if you ask me. If you heard the word meter mixed with some prefix, it tells you that you are talking about measurement in the metric system. Now real men know that you must have inches, feet, yards, and miles. Don’t bother me with that whole “every time you multiply by ten, it changes the prefix” nonsense. There are twelve inches in a foot. Three feet in a yard. 5,280 feet or 1,760 yards in a mile. See? Perfectly logical. I almost forgot about acres. Those are 1/640 of a square mile or 43,560 square feet. An acre is about 40% of a hectare which is either another unit of measurement or the Greco-Roman God of Confusing Mankind. I can’t remember which.

Then there is the one kind of metrics that has been sneaking into our lives for years. The clever little liter. As much as it tries, the American system still holds on and fights for its right for a part of the pie. We go to the store and buy a two liter of soda, but we sit it beside our gallon of milk. You would think they could just learn to get along; but I caught the milk bouncing on the soda the other day. So instead of liters, we have fluid ounces, pints, quarts and gallons. Now a fluid ounce and an ounce used for weight have nothing in common other than the name. So there are sixteen fluid ounces in a pint. There are two pints in a quart. Four quarts make a gallon. Perfectly logical.

We could talk about ounces and pounds verse grams and kilograms, but you get the idea. Metrics are just too easy and make too much sense for Americans. We can’t have that stuff around here.

And what kind of system keeps the same prefixes no matter what you are measuring? Everyone knows that you can’t do that. Weight has one system. Length has another. Temperature is its own. You can’t take the base name like meter and add kilo to it to make it 1,000 meters. That is just silly. Who would think megameter would be a million meters or gigameter would be a billion meters? The next thing they are going to say is that a tetrameter is trillion meters. Everyone knows that only works when we’re talking about memory on our computers. It can’t possible apply to other forms of measurement.

I think I have shown you how much more sense the American methods of measurements make than the system used by everyone else. Now can someone please explain why something we American obviously invented is called the English method? (Yes, that was more sarcasm.)