Besides baseball and apple pie, there's probably nothing more American than the Imperial measurement system, invented by our friends across the pond over the past several centuries. Whether it’s pounds, miles, feet or inches, nothing describes attributes quite like the Imperial measurement system. Though infidels have occasionally made inroads to converting our great country over to metric, a few tireless souls have stood guard and kept this mistake at bay. Yes metric can easily convert from the small guys to the big guys (like 60 inches = 5 feet) and yes metric is used in 99% of the countries in the world. But you know what the problem is? Metric just doesn’t work in poem or song. Imagine just what the metric system would do to our beloved country music.

Por ejamplo, here’s an excerpt from a George Strait tune called “As Far As It Goes”:

Lately I've found myself fallin'
Deeper in love with you
I'm not the kind of guy
Who gets swept away
So here's what I'm gonna do

I'm gonna give you this heart of mine
But that's where I draw the line

I'm only gonna give you everything
Take it a mile beyond the end, of the road
I'm gonna love you one day past forever
But that's as far as it goes

I don’t know what it is about metric, but it has an incredible ability to suck the emotion out of anything. Imagine it as:

I'm only gonna give you everything
Take it a kilometer beyond the end, of the road
I'm gonna love you one day past forever
But that's as far as it goes

Suddenly I feel like he’s an East German border guard explaining in code the best way to escape to Western Germany. And here’s another kilometer problem from LeAnne Womack’s “Montgomery to Memphis”:

Looking back at where I was I can see how far I've come
From a nobody with a broken heart to feeling like someone
Now you say you want me back boy let me tell you this
It's a million miles from Montgomery to Memphis

Sometimes I’ve thought, maybe it’s the polysyllabic nature of metric that doesn’t work, so I’ll shorten it to kilo:

Looking back at where I was I can see how far I've come
From a nobody with a broken heart to feeling like someone
Now you say you want me back boy let me tell you this
It's a million kilos from Montgomery to Memphis

What? What is that? That’s just plain messed up. That ain’t American, and it certainly ain’t art. Imagine the world in metric:

Jules Verne’s “111,120 kilometers Under the Sea”
Stephen King’s “The Green 1.609344 kilometer” or even “The Green Kilo”
HBO’s “1.8288 meters Under”

And imagine a cowboy wearing a 37.854118 liter hat- he’s not gonna rustle up trouble with that thing on. This list goes on and on- I’m sure some of my astute readers could rustle up some other examples. So please, please mon freund, if you ever become tempted to use the metric system, just remember it’s likely to cause a ton of trouble.