Benjamin Olson
Hero
And a yard is a basically disfavored unit of measurement in the systems that have it. Americans use it almost exclusively for dimensions related to athletics, and because it is a decent unit to measure distances run. Even when we use yardsticks we are actually concerned about using them to measure feet.
A meter being yardlike is actually evidence of its poor fit as a dominant unit of measurement given that people in a system with both something about the length of a yard and something about the length of a foot as the primary unit for relatively short lengths have fairly consistently chosen the latter.
I don't follow the logic. So I owe it something? By responding to me in English, have you sworn some eternal fealty to the English language?
Or is the argument that computers are only made possible by the metric system? Pretty dubious.
My accusations of arrogance were aimed at the Enlightenment era that birthed the metric system, so not really about the dynamics of internet arguments you've seen. I should have been clearer.
And it's not to say that I hate the Enlightenment, but it was powered to a fair extent by an arrogant belief that everything done before which could not be synchronized with Enlightenment ideas of what made things legitimate (a basis in what fancy thinkers felt was "Reason") was utterly worthless and should probably be abolished, regardless of whether it was working just fine for normal people. The intellectual vibe was very much "shut up peasants, the Intelligentsia knows what's best for you".
And of course this all reached it's apogee in 1793 when some Enlightenment nerds got enough sway over actual government in that phase of the French Revolution to attempt to institute decimal timekeeping, abolish religion, and impose many other radical redesigns of society from the ground up. The Metric system, which had been rolled out a several revolutionary phases earlier was a less extreme case of this same way of thinking.
Of course if anything the fact that metric measurements endured and decimal time was a disastrous experiment is evidence of the prior having some actual quality to justify its staying power. And I think it does. But the usefulness is that the world had reached a level of globalization where having many different countries have different weights and measures was no longer viable, so something had to become an international standard. Metric was new and exciting, and more importantly because of its aggressively anti-traditional Enlightenment theory, was the most non-culturally specific option, even in spite of its heavy French Revolutionary association (and ugly "classical" nomenclature). It was the option countries could adopt while accepting the smallest amount of foreign imperial associations.
And good for the metric system. Where I take issue is that people just seem to accept the arguments of its creators for it being a good system as being valid because it won, whereas it's victory probably had more to do with happenstance, and at its core it is actually less elegant and more cumbersome than it appears.
At the very least the names are a travesty. Our fancy 18th century intellectual metric boosters just had to go greco-roman, and just had to combine it all in a system prioritizing rigid consistency over ease of use, or whether the sounds flowed well. And so even common units get absurd strings of syllables. Try writing a song or poem with metric units sometime... it's not happening, they are awkward, inhuman, and (in an ironic pun) don't conform well to meters. Is the centimeter intrinsically worse than the inch, I think it is a little to small to be as convenient for as many things... but it's certainly debatable. What is not debatable is that it takes 4 times as many syllables to do the same thing as an inch just so that someone, after a lifetime of using it, never forgets that it is one hundredth of a meter.
