People have been arguing since the French Revolution that the United States ought to adopt the metric system. It’s logical, they say. It’s all based on decimals, they say. Pshaw, I say. They just use decimals as an excuse. The meter, from which the system gets its name, is 1/10,000,000 of the distance of the meridian passing through Paris, from the North Pole to the equator.

And how, in 1790, did they know the distance of the meridian passing through Paris from the North Pole to the equator, you ask? I presume they stepped it off, and the number they got was in feet, which they divided by 10,000,000 to get 39.37 inches. Not satisfied to round it off to a yard, they had to call it a meter.

You see, the metric system really is based on the English system which is now pretty much the American system, give or take a stone.

Having settled on the meter, some ninny came up with a bunch of prefixes for things that were longer or shorter, and forced people to memorize them. Ten meters is a decameter, 10 decameters is a hectometer, 10 hectometers is a kilometer Then megameter for a million of the damned things, gigameter is a billion meters, and a trillion meters is a hell of a long ways.

Going the other direction, a tenth of a meter is 3.937 inches. Or, in French, a decimeter. 1/100^th of a meter is centimeter, 1/1,000 a millimeter, a millionth of a meter is a micrometer, which is really a gauge for measuring stuff. Then a nanometer is a billionth of a meter and a picometer is just a speck.

So that took care of distance, at least from the North Pole to the equator. Except they eventually weren’t happy with that, because, well, the French. Now a meter is determined to be 1/299,792,458^th of the distance light travels in a second. It seemed so logical, so why not. It’s still 39.37 inches, but the math is a whole hell of a lot more impressive.

But what about stuff? For that, there is the gram. It’s pretty small, so mostly there’s the kilogram. And those other prefixes too.

 Now hang on. Thankfully they didn’t mess with time; there’s still seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks, months and years. None of it based on decimals, until you get to decades and centuries. But who wants a ten-day week anyway?

Apparently, while they were at the North Pole, they decided to mess with temperature, and invented Celsius. Now, if you know the Fahrenheit temperature, which you will because it’s on your thermometer and your phone and everywhere, and you want to know what that is in Celsius, (but, why?) you simply subtract 32 and multiply by 5/9.

 There’s more. Liter, radian, joule, coulomb, farad, lux, and becquerel–really. A becquerel is “one reciprocal second” (there is no explaining what a reciprocal second might be). Then a sievert, and a katal.

They took perfectly good words and co-opted them into some metric mumbo-jumbo. A mole, which is a snitch, is also a metric unit of amount of substance, exactly 6.02214076 x 10²³ particles.

Hertz is not a metric rental car, but, like becquerel, is a reciprocal second, because you might forget where you left your keys.

• Newton
• Pascal
• Watt
• Volt – one joule per coulomb.
• Weber – not the grill, a weber is one volt second; see volt
• Tesla – not related at all to hertz, it’s one weber per square meter, which is about how much room a Weber takes up.
• Ohm
• Siemens
• Lumen, and
• Gray – one joule per kilogram, a joule being one newton meter and a newton is one kilogram-meter per second squared. Hence the term “gray area.”

The English system, on the other hand, is much more straightforward. It starts with the foot. Everyone knows what a foot is. If you only have a foot and a half, that’s a cubit. A cubit is also the distance from the fingertips to the elbow. Cubit hasn’t really been heard of since the Old Testament. Maybe because they’re not sure whose arm to measure.

If you have three feet, you are not only peculiar, you have a yard. 

An ell, on the other hand, is the distance from that other hand outstretched to the opposite shoulder. It’s equal to twenty nails, (we’ll get there) or one and a fourth yards. (And all this time you thought an ell was an elevated subway. An elevated subway, however, is an oxymoron).

Fathom, the distance between arms outstretched, from fingertip to fingertip, or six feet.

A rod is 16 and a half feet, or five yards and a cubit. There are four rods in a chain and one hundred links in a chain.

A furlong is the distance a team of plow horses can furrow without taking a break, which of course we know to be 40 rods, because plow horses had a strong union.

A mile, with which you might be familiar, comes from walking 1,000 paces in someone else’s moccasins, and is 8 furlongs.

So, you see now how simple this is.

And if you have something that’s less than a foot – the English system has you covered there too.

A span is the width of the outstretched hand, from the tip of the thumb to the tip of the little finger. It’s 9 inches. (see inch below, but I’d really rather you didn’t skip ahead)

If you don’t stretch out your fingers, but stick out your thumb, you’ve got a shaftment, which is either 6 inches or a hitchhiker. Those of you measuring a shaftment as six inches in any other way are going to have to stay after class.

A hand is four inches, and a palm is three inches.

A nail is 3 digits or 1/16 of a yard.

An inch, for which you’ve been waiting patiently, is three barleycorns. That means, obviously, there are 36 barleycorns in a foot and 36 inches or 1,296 108 barleycorns in a yard.

A finger is 7/8 of an inch. If you give someone the finger, it’s only two and five-eighths barleycorns. Really not all that much.

A digit is ¾ inch.

A barleycorn is 1/3 of an inch. That’s not a lot of help since an inch is 3 barleycorns, but if you’ve got a ruler in the drawer, you know what an inch is anyway.

A line is ¼ of a barleycorn, and the shortest distance between two points.

A poppyseed is 1/5 of a barleycorn.

We could go on into things like perch (a square rod), rood (forty square rods) and acre which is one chain wide and one furlong in length, or about the size of a football field. If you happen to have an ox and a plow (or plough) you know that in a year that ox could plough a bovate, which is 15 acres or one-eighth of a carucate, which would require eight oxen. But where would you keep them?

Now, let’s get back to detail work.

A poppyseed is a 15^th of an inch, which doesn’t show up on your ruler, and isn’t really very small at all, it turns out. So you need to know, for instance that a tad is larger than a dash and a dash is larger than a drop. There are 24 dashes in a tablespoon. None of that helps if you’re hanging a mirror and are told it needs to go just a tad to the right. In that case, a tad is pretty good size. It’s twice as big as a smidgen and three times the size of skosh. A tad, it turns out is the exact same size as a little bit.

Occasionally, we all need to deal in very precise measurement, for which you need to know that a jot and a tittle together are of course larger than a jot; a tittle being the dot over an i or a j. (See picometer, speck) That makes a tittle a hair’s breadth; often misspelled and mispronounced as hair’s breath, which not only makes no sense, but just pisses me off a tad.

And that is why the English system is so much better. Try being pissed off a deci-something.