The Odd Clauses by Jay Wexler Read Free Book Online Page A

report was praised to the heavens by some of his contemporaries, but for me, it was damned near impossible to read. In fact, I pretty much gave up when I got to an impenetrable passage about an English law from the year 1266 that purported to describe exactly how many pounds a “farthing loaf” of bread, whatever that is, was supposed to weigh. Anyway, from what I could tell by skimming the rest of the report (and the much more succinct summaries of the report that I could find online), Adams thought it was a good idea to standardize the nation’s weights and measures, but he thought it would be a bad idea to adopt the metric system. Among other things, Adams thought it would make no sense to adopt the measurement system of France when most of our commerce was still with England. Not a bad point. In any event, by all accounts, Congress completely ignored Adams’s report and did nothing much of importance about weights and measures for another fifty years.
    The metric system issue came up again in 1866. In that year, Congress passed a law that made it legal for merchants to use the metric system in the United States and provided that “no contract, or dealing, or pleading in any court, shall be deemed invalid or liable to objection, because the weights or measures expressed or referred to therein are weights or measures of the Metric System.” At the same time, the chairman of a House of Representatives committee on uniformity of weights and measures called upon a committee of academics at the State University of New York in Albany to prepare a report on the issue of whether Congress should adopt the metric system as the uniform weights-and-measures system for the nation. This report, much shorter and more accessible than Adams’s tome, concluded once again that the United States should keep the zany English pound-and-foot system.
    The report rejects the idea of adopting the metric system for a variety of reasons, some pragmatic and others more theoretical. From a pragmatic perspective, the report cites the old “how can we make a change when England hasn’t changed” argument, and it also makes a big deal of what a huge pain it would be to convert all the traditional measurements into a newfangled system. The writers further suggest that, given these difficulties, the American people would be unlikely to accept any new system of measurement, particularly one from France: “That the conflict will be fierce in this country, where the people are freer and less habituated to blind obedience to imperial edicts, cannot be doubted,” write the authors of the report, “nor will the fact that the system comes from a foreign country, whose language and institutions are alike unknown to us, be without its influence.”
    The more interesting of the report’s arguments are the ones that defend our traditional system as actually being better than the metric system. Better?
Really?
Why? Well, for one thing, the traditional system is better because its basic measurements of length—the foot, the yard, the cubit, thefathom—are all derived one way or another from the human body (the yard, for instance, is described as being “the average distance from the centre of the lips to the extremity of the middle finger, when the arm is extended”—who knew?). Such a system of natural referents, it is suggested, is “more likely to meet the wants of a people than one made amid the turbulence of a revolution, by a committee of learned professors.” Moreover, the “short, sharp Saxon words” like “gallon” or “ton” or “bushel” are superior to the long, complicated terms of the metric system, like “demi-decigramme.” Indeed, our system is overall much simpler than the alternative, as the authors try to argue by comparing how the two approaches would describe a plot of land: “Every lot of ground 25 feet front, by 100