Читать книгу White Asparagus - D. R. Belz - Страница 10

Now that there’s a well-established European Union, you can bet that sooner or later the specter of the United States converting to the metric system will rise again.

But I don’t care what they say. I don’t care how many public service commercials they produce. They might be able to tax my income, regulate my driving, standardize my deductions, approximate my demographic make-up, optimize my consumer-producer potential, as well as take all of the hormones out of my beef jerky, but no government in the world is going to make me “think metric.”

They can’t make me think in meters, kilograms, liters or Celsius. I like thinking in the English system. I speak in English. I write in English. Why can’t I walk, lift, drink, and even sweat in English?

I’ve heard that the metric system is logical, accurate, and scientific. Above all, it’s systematic. Well, therein lies the downfall—and the beauty—of the English system. It’s entirely chaotic. Two pints to the quart, four quarts to the gallon, 36 inches to the yard, 5,280 feet to the mile—this wonderful non-system glories in whimsy, in arbitrariness.

It seems to me the world is a lot like that—fluid, unpredictable, inaccurate. The indiscriminate English system of measurement is perfectly suited to this, the most indiscriminate of all possible worlds.

While government and business might conspire to change my monkey wrench into a metric spanner, force me to fill up my gas tank with liters of gas, and establish that a trip from Baltimore to Ocean City, Maryland is 243.2 kilometers, I can rest with the knowledge that they will never succeed in purging our language of the poetic, albeit unscientific influences of the English system.

After all, what other name for a hogshead but its own? How else does an engine run but on horsepower? Five hundred sheets of paper is nothing other than a ream. A score of something? Why 20, of course. A dozen is 12; a kindly baker makes it out to be 13. I’ve given my body strict instructions: When I give blood, it is to stop at a pint—none of this liter stuff.

If something is incredibly heavy, it weighs—not a metric ton—just a plain old ton. Horses are hands high, their reins feet long. They run not kilometers, but furlongs. Football players fight for yardage. A country mile is substantially longer than a stone’s throw; a city mile is 12 blocks, a block being what you fancy.

My shirt size is 36 long in inches; my neck size is 16 of the same—just keep those crawly centimeters off my body. If you’ve ever chopped a cord of wood, you know exactly how much it costs in calories, those magical quanta responsible for shedding ounces and pounds. It would take a meat ax to take off a kilogram, I’m sure. When sailing, you look to do knots, not kilometers per hour. Our clothes are made from bolts of cloth, measured in yards, to be sure. And I’ve never missed having an accident by a millimeter, but by a hairsbreadth.

Most official rhetoric on the change to metric emphasizes that the United States is the last industrialized nation yet to switch over to the metric system. Even the English, they tell us, have abandoned the English system.

Since when has the United States done anything sensible just because everyone else is doing it?

I say, let’s force the rest of the world to be poetic, backward, and unsystematic.

Let’s make them use the old feet-yards-miles and see how they like being force-fed some kind of foreign conspiracy.

Let us not budge in this weighty matter—not one iota! Let inefficiency reign! Long live the square acre!