Back to the OP. Frankly, I know the metric system and have never had the urge to “learn” the system. What I mean is, I know about how far 100 yards is, about how much is a pint, but have never learned how far 100 meters or a kilometer. My kids don’t either. I view the metric system as something scientific or just the odd thing like 2 liters of soda, which to me is like a gallon. And since we don’t do drugs, i’ll never quite know what a kilo weighs.
We can only convert by someone standing up and saying, it’s time. But the government isn’t interested in stirring up the hornets nest, heck daylight savings time is still contraversial in some rural parts. I doubt any president wants to be known as the idiot that screwed up something that worked.
2 liters is a lot less than a gallon.
Balthisar writes:
> Wendell Wagner, statements like “we Americans” can be
> recognized as a gross generality that’s commonly accepted. I
> do quite well in the metric system and completely am outside
> Krokodil’s description, but I can recognize the generality of it.
> We as Americans are pretty stupid about Canada, too. Even
> though I’m not, and a whole lot of Americans aren’t, either.
Well, no. As a gross generality, it’s probably wrong, and in any case Krokodil doesn’t have any evidence for it. When he says:
> We Americans view the Metric system with suspicion (If we own
> a foreign car, we have to buy a second set of wrenches, for
> one thing). We see it as being of a piece with soccer and
> socialism.
he’s saying one of two things: Either he seriously believes this claim, in which case he has no evidence for it except that this is what he and his three or four best friends believe, and he thinks that this proves that therefore nearly all Americans must believe this, or else he’s just joking. If he’s just joking, it’s even more disturbing. The OP, after all, was a non-American willing to give Americans a break by asking them about their use of the metric system without stereotyping them. Instead, what Krokodil is saying (jokingly, but with the implication that it’s mostly true) is that, yeah, we are stereotypes. We do think that anybody who uses the metric system or who plays soccer or who is slightly less hard-core capitalist than us is one of those evil furriners that we shouldn’t trust. If he wants to believe this, fine, but he shouldn’t pretend to speak for all Americans.