Hello all! I’m extraordinarily sorry for the incredibly long post, but it should read rather quickly, and I didn't want to break this up into a million topics.
A few nights ago, I was Skyping with a friend; I needed to grab my newly received TARDIS cookie jar that was just outside my room to make a Doctor Who-related joke. I said to her, “Hang on a sec, it’s just four metres* away” because the place I like to sit at my computer in my room is exactly 4 m, as the crow flies, from the threshold of my bedroom door. Before I could even get up to get it, I saw her eyes roll and heard her scoff, as if to say, “This is America! We don't use metric!” which I’ve encountered many a time before. Now, I’ve read virtually every page of metric.org, Metrication Matters, metric.org.uk, metricviews.org.uk, Metric Methods, metrication.us, a good portion of US and UK law regarding their respective metric muddles, much of which I found on the sites listed, read as many posts in the Listserv archive as I could, and various things from NIST, BIPM, even anti-metric websites, et cetera just to prepare a sound argument against automatic nay-sayers. Since all of you wonderful people basically were my sources (I linked her to your respective sites), most of what I told her need not be repeated for the sake of (relative) brevity, and I wish to thank you for the time put into it. In return, I will tell you of some interesting observations I’ve made regarding the use of SI in the United States. I started kindergarten at the age of five, as American children do, in 1998, in the city of San Antonio, Texas. That first year of schooling is mostly a blur to me bar some unrelated-to-metrication specifics like the face of my teacher. However, in first grade, we (my class and I) learned the metric system because of its simplicity. Everyone in that room being taught that year, myself included, is metric-native, so to speak. Everything that year was done solely in metric, from us figuring out heights and masses in metres and kilograms, to determining the outside temperature in degrees Celsius to measuring the heights of plants grown in class and figuring out how much water with which to water the individual plants in millilitres; I even remember passing around 1 g to 1 kg weights and being told that a nickel (US$0.05 coin) had a mass of exactly five grams. The metre stick was one of the most-used tools in the classroom. Life was good and completely SI. And then our idyllic lives were destroyed at the state of second grade. Sure, metric was retained for occasional usage, but that was the year we started using the dual-sided ruler. Our first foray into the confusing-especially-for-a-second-grader world of United States customary units was estimating how many millimetres were in an inch! That very lesson began the decline of the usage of the metric system (outwardly, of course, everything hidden shown by Mr. Naughtin in his “Don’t Use Metric” article remained) in my school years unless I was in a science class. We soon learned about gallons, quarts, pints, cups (no distinction was made on dry versus fluid), feet, yards, inches, and miles. Classmates of mine especially struggled with the freezing and boiling points of the Fahrenheit scale. (My sister, who would follow me into school a few years later, surprisingly had both the same first and second grade teachers as I. As of a few days ago when I asked her about it, she does not remember learning SI in first grade, so perhaps my teacher got berated for it or the curriculum changed. Hopefully, my sister just doesn’t have a good memory.) Fast-forward a bit. I moved from San Antonio to the town of Huntley, Illinois right before my eighth-grade year. Fast-forward to this past school year, my senior (12th grade) year, during which I was taking biology. At this point, I’d now been in Illinois for almost five years. Throughout the year, everything was rightfully in metric. The last quarter of school began, and we had to take yet another test, no surprise there. Our first unit to begin that quarter required us to be familiar with a PCR machine/thermal cycler. Okay, fine. On this introductory quiz, we had to convert 50 °C and other similar temperatures to degrees Fahrenheit! My first thought was, “What‽ Why? This is a science class! I’ve never used Fahrenheit in a science class! This is crazy!” I thought it couldn’t get any worse until someone asked me, “Hey, there are 10 mm in a centimetre, right?” Really? I’d assumed that everyone, like me, had been taught the metric system thoroughly at a young age. But, then again, I hadn’t been raised or gone to elementary school in Huntley. (I had a similar reaction in ninth grade to an acquaintance who didn’t know the capital of Norway; in sixth grade, back in Texas, we’d been required to learn the location and capital of every country of the world.) Perhaps, I thought, I’d just had a really good school district, school, or teacher growing up compared to this. That’s not to say my teachers in Illinois were bad, because they weren’t, and I’d only had one teacher in Texas that kept us purely metric, but I definitely thought of the other kids as at a disadvantage. I told this all to my friend whom I was Skyping. I told her how I’d learned the metric system first, so I felt most comfortable using it, even with near-concurrent exposure to United States customary units all my life, and asked her a few questions about her schools. She hadn’t grown up in Huntley schools either, but in another town about 35 km away. She said that she didn’t learn about the metric system (note: not “learn it”, but “learn ABOUT” it) until fourth grade, and even then, she said her class didn’t spend more than two days on it. Granted, that’s more than how long it should take to actually learn it, but she was merely learning about it. Yet, I pressed on with my measurement-related questioning. I asked her how many feet were in a mile. She had no idea. How many metres in 1 km? 1000, she replied. Correct. How many yards in a foot? (Trick question) One-third. (Blast! Correct!) How many centimetres in a metre? 100. Correct. How many cubic inches in a gallon. No idea. Correct. Which is larger, the imperial gallon or the US gallon? She had no idea the imperial gallon existed, nor did she know the difference between them. What’s the freezing point of Celsius? 0°. Freezing point of Fahrenheit? “Thirty-something?” Boiling (Fahrenheit)? No clue. Boiling (Celsius)? 100°. Correct. Millilitres in a litre? 1000. Correct. Just to throw a wrench in the works, “How much is a hectolitre**?” 100 L. Correct. I came to the conclusion that we Americans understand the metric system better than US customary units, even if we do not realize it, simply because metric’s simpler. My friend had never officially learned the ins and outs of the metric system, yet she remembered all of this from two days in fourth grade. To bring it all home I said, “If it’s good enough for the government, our military, our industry, our scientists, and our doctors, then it’s good enough for the general public.” She agreed. I’ve put one more American in the metric camp. This brings me to my next point. My parents. They were in middle school/junior high when the US Metric Board was created, and in college (university) by the time it was dissolved. My mom remembers seeing kilometre per hour speed limit signs in some places; my stepdad thought his friend was a “total nerd” for manually writing in kilometre markings on the speedometer of his family’s car because markings in kilometres weren’t mandated then. This boggles my mind because my generation has grown up never seeing a car without a dual-marked speedometer, never seeing a product without both metric and United States customary units on it, never buying two quarts/a half-gallon of soda—to us, it’s always been in litres, and never even knowing that engines were sold in cubic inch-based sizes. Now, they tease me about using the metric system, all in good fun, (e.g., when Aron Ralston, played by James Franco, said in 127 Hours that he only had a certain number of millilitres of water left, my stepdad tapped me and said, “See, there you go, Mr. Metric,”) but wouldn’t they of all people understand it better than others? They were told we would switch over when we were actually switching over, after all (as was I, but that’s another story). I even speak metric with my grandfather (though he learned it mostly in the navy)! My stepdad rode his bike about 20 km, according to metric-only bike computer, and asked me to convert it to miles. I refused. As he was unwilling to keep track of his progress in kilometres, despite the fact that his bike computer did just that, I told him it was a certain amount of times to and from the house to a place nearby. He had to convert to miles on his own, even though I knew the conversion. It’s like they’re almost in denial that metric is in this country, even though they were taught it! I have a Voss-branded bottle of water (I only wanted it for the bottle) that has 800 mL of water. I took a permanent marker to it and marked every 100 mL on the bottle, for my own amusement. After my stepdad inquired about it, my mom said I’d marked off the bottle in *centimetres*. “Millilitres!” I yelled. “Oh, ha, millilitres,” was his response. Then, he said something about “grams of blood” that I couldn’t quite make out. Now for some shorter observations; I’m almost done — I promise. •All my weather on my computer is metric. This is how I report it to friends on Facebook. They don’t complain, but they don’t say they understand, either. •Weather.com switches everything except written weather warnings and certain written summaries to metric when the “°C” button is clicked. Wind speed is in kilometres per hour, though there’s no space between the value and “km/h” on under “Right Now”, but there is a space under “Today”, “Tonight”, and “Tomorrow”. Likewise for temperatures and the “°C” symbol (but only a degrees sign under Today, Tonight, and Tomorrow). Rain is in millimetres; snow is in centimetres. •Recently, I posted *“Within the past 24 hours, the 30 km² of land that make up Huntley received 5.6 mm of rain, meaning that 168,000 m³ (168,000,000 L) of water was absorbed into the soil. 168,000 TONNES OF WATER.” * on Facebook; two of my friends liked it: one a native-born American and the other a Lithuanian who’s moved here and thanked me for “speaking metric” with her. •If Puerto Rico were to become a state, could that put more pressure on the government to metricate? In Puerto Rico, gasoline is sold in litres and distances on signs are marked in kilometres. Speed limits, alas, are still in miles per hour, temperature in degrees Fahrenheit, and low clearance signs in feet and inches. Not that metrication should lie on the fate of one territory, but perhaps statehood would better let other Americans see that metric is used by Americans here on roads, and things are fine; I know some that think it’s a foreign country, and thus, pay no attention to it! (Just like some don’t think the US Virgin Islands is American soil because they drive on the left.) When my parents visited Puerto Rico, they adjusted quickly to the litre-based gas prices and kilometre distance signs. However, even within Puerto Rico, the signage could use some work. From their photos, I saw a construction sign that warned of a roadblock in “600 MTS” rather than “600 m” and exit signs that frequently said things like “1/2 KM”—exactly what ISN’T supposed to happen with SI—instead of “500 m” (Would that last one be better rounded to 800 m?). •When I was in Mexico, speed limits were in “Km/h” and signs frequently used “MTS” instead of “m”. •In the Bahamas, everything I saw was in imperial: feet and inches, pounds, as well as miles and miles per hour. •Canada was completely metric in what I saw, of course. •I had to get an MRI a while back. My doctors were thankful that I gave them my height in metres and mass in kilograms. •Riding around with family, I changed the cars’ GPS units to metric (and French, sometimes, because I like practicing what I’ve learned). Everything in the car except for the Fahrenheit outside temperature reading, mile-based digital odometer, and dual-unit manual speedometer go metric correctly. Inside temperatures are changed in 500 m°C increments, fuel economy is translated into litres per 100 km. Voice directions change from “in about a quarter of a mile” to “in about 400 m”, “in about half a mile” into “in about 1 km”. Anything larger or smaller than that is changed into “In [however many] kilometres” or “in [a number of] metres.” If I leave the GPSes in metric after we get back home, they’re usually not pleased. Once, during winter, my mom was driving by herself and was cold, so she turned the temperature up; usually she doesn’t look at the specific temperature, but just turns the knob a bit, and I’d safely left it in metric for days without her noticing. Well, one day, she did looked at the temperature. She kept turning the knob higher and higher, but the temperature wouldn’t go past 32.0 °C. She hadn’t noticed the “°C”, so she figured something was wrong with the car. When she got home, she was cold and asked me if I changed it, to which I replied in the affirmative. It turns out, since she couldn’t turn the temperature higher, she thought the car was going to blow up and turned off the climate control. I am not joking. I love my mom. * I use the -re spellings of metre and litre, despite promotion of -er by NIST, because I noticed that “meter stick” could be interpreted as “a stick that measures” or “a stick 1 m long”, even though, when I read “meter”, I automatically think length, not a measuring device, because the -re spelling is sometimes used here in the States (I’ve seen water and, oddly, shampoo advertised by the “litre” and it’s never confused anyone familiar with the -er spelling; even my measuring cup have “LITRES” written on it), and it’s not incorrect, and because in other metrication discussions, I am too frequently automatically deemed the stupid American by everyone else in the Anglophone world, frequently getting comments like “Americans are too stupid to learn metric. It’s spelled ‘metre’!” or “Your country doesn’t even use metric! The least you can do is spell it right!”, and although I know no one here would dream of saying things like that, it does get a little tiring. However, in my letters to Congress, I will use -er spellings because the last thing I want is metrication to be delayed because some paranoid senator says, “HE’S UN-AMERICAN!” ** I would never really use hectolitres. Zach Rodriguez http://twitter.com/nativetexanzach
