The Metric System:
A Love Letter from
Americans Who Are Tired

We’re tired. We’re so tired. Do you know what a furlong is? Neither do we. But it’s in our system.

Twelve inches in a foot. Three feet in a yard. One thousand seven hundred and sixty yards in a mile. Five thousand two hundred and eighty feet in a mile. Why? Nobody knows. Nobody has ever known. We asked a math teacher once and she just stared at us like we’d asked her to explain the existence of God.

There are also rods. And chains. And furlongs. A furlong is 660 feet, or one-eighth of a mile, or the distance a team of oxen could plow without resting. That’s real. Our measurement system is based on how tired an ox gets. We are measuring the modern world using ox fatigue as a baseline.

Meanwhile, Canada is over there with the metric system, dividing everything by ten like people who respect themselves.

The Temperature Situation

Canada uses Celsius. Zero is freezing. One hundred is boiling. That’s it. That’s the whole system. A child could learn it in thirty seconds. A child does learn it in thirty seconds, in every country on earth except ours.

In Fahrenheit, freezing is 32 degrees. Why 32? We don’t know. We’ve never known. Daniel Fahrenheit invented it in 1724 and we’ve just been going along with it for three hundred years out of what we can only describe as inertia and stubbornness. Boiling is 212. The difference between freezing and boiling is 180 degrees. One hundred and eighty. What are we doing.

A Canadian says “It’s minus twenty out.” You know exactly what that means. It means stay inside. An American says “It’s four degrees out.” That could be cold. That could be very cold. You won’t know until you open the door and the air hurts your face.

Celsius is honest. Fahrenheit is a guessing game invented by a man in the 18th century who thought the temperature of his wife’s armpit was a useful data point. That’s also real. Look it up.

The One Exception (and It’s Comforting)

Now. We should acknowledge something. Canadians still use feet and inches for height. They still use pounds for weight. Ask a Canadian how tall they are and they will not say 183 centimeters. They will say six foot. Ask them how much they weigh and they will tell you in pounds, not kilograms, because nobody — nobody — knows what they weigh in kilograms.

Even Canada couldn’t go full metric on body measurements. This is weirdly comforting. It means the metric system is perfect for everything except the deeply personal business of describing your own physical body, at which point even the most logical nation reverts to the old ways. Humans are funny like that.

A Canadian once gave us directions in kilometers. We nodded like we understood. We did not understand. We drove for an extra twenty minutes because we were converting in our heads and doing it wrong. “Take the exit in 40 kilometers.” Is that far? Is that close? It turned out to be 25 miles, which we also couldn’t visualize, because Americans measure driving distance in time. “It’s about twenty minutes.” That’s our metric. Minutes. We measure space using time. We are not a serious people.

The Dream We’ll Never Achieve

Americans will never switch. We know this. We’ve accepted this. We tried once, in 1975. Congress passed the Metric Conversion Act. It was voluntary. Nobody volunteered. The act quietly expired and nobody noticed because we were too busy measuring things in cups and tablespoons and “a pinch,” which is not a unit. “A pinch” is a feeling.

But we can admire it from a distance. Like watching someone else’s well-organized garage. We’re not going to clean our garage. We know that about ourselves. But we can stand in your driveway and appreciate that your wrenches are sorted by size — in millimeters, no less — and feel a kind of longing that we’ll never act on.

The metric system is logical, elegant, and universal. America will adopt it approximately never. But we can dream. In increments of ten.

This article is approximately 700 words long.
We don’t know what that is in metric.
Probably still 700 words.
Words might be the one thing we agree on.