“Keep backing up, Dad. You’ve got at least three meters to go.”
    “But Adam, I can’t think metric! How close am I — really?”
    Thus went a terse dialogue a quarter-century ago, when our oldest son was telling me how much real estate I had to back up the pickup for dumping trash, before falling off a precipice at least a kilometer deep. Clearly he was doing only as he learned from math teachers at Memorial Middle School.
    But those of us who grew up using English units are dia-metric-ally opposed to anything new.

    Does anyone remember when people thought metrically? Teachers pounded it into us during a movement in the ‘70s and ‘80s to give all of civilization exposure to metrics, and though there are still vestiges of that effort, it’s moribund. About the only exposure most travelers get to metrics is reading a mileage sign as they return from Santa Fe, showing Las Vegas some 98 kilometers away.
    German-born Eugen Johe of Ojitos Frios tried to convince me that metrics makes more sense than what it failed to replace. “You either multiply by 10 or divide by 10. It’s that simple,” he said. Johe reminded me that his home country and most of Europe have adopted the metric system. The system actually started in France in 1670; it was fairly recently that the short-lived act got passed in the U.S.
    Tomas Salazar, who taught math at Cuba, N.M., Albuquerque Academy, Fort Lewis College and Highlands University, agrees metrics is logical but said whatever impetus the movement generated with the passage of the Metric Conversion Act of 1975 all but died just a few years later.
    “Working on my doctorate in math,” Salazar said, “people kept saying, ‘It’s just a matter of time before metrics takes over.’”
    Though I see the lack of logic in the use of English units — the length of a tenth of a foot, for example, or the use of “ounce” for both liquid and weight measures — that doesn’t enhance my understanding of or appreciation for a deciliter. Even a worker who churns out metric socket wrenches in a factory is going to ask for a 12-ounce can of pop rather than 355 ml. of the stuff.
    The lack of logic in determining what an inch is, exactly, comes from the decree of some ancient ruler — er — monarch, who apparently determined that a foot was the length of his foot.
    It’s true that many bottled drinks come in one- and two-liter sizes, but metrics will fly only if the units are small and rounded off. It’s also true that most products on shelves contain a mixture of metric and English unit information, but those who resist metrics ignore that bit of information.
    Attending LaMaze classes before the birth of our third-born, Benji, we heard the leader insist that we get her to the hospital “when she’s dilated three centimeters.”
    “Now what’s a centimeter?” I asked. Instantly, a host of other husbands created shapes with their hands that ranged from an f.16 lens aperture to something a wee bit larger than the Dolly Parton Towers in Cincinnati.
    Even though the metric system, which uses deciliters, milliliters, millimeters, decimeters, kilometers, grams, centigrade degrees, etc. really makes more sense, it’s cumbersome, unless one grows up with it.
    Despite the modified use of metrics in track-and-field events, as with the 100-meter run, it hasn’t made inroads into mainstream sports.
    Imagine laying out a football field metrically and decreeing that one scores a touchdown by having the ball reach the 91.44 meter line, or that midfield is the 45.72 meter line.
    Martha Brockenbrough, in a Wikipedia article on metrics, points out that there are practical ways of figuring out the length of a meter: it’s about the height of a door knob, and a small paper clip weighs about a gram.
    And if the metric movement were to become too successful, people could order a McDonald’s favorite, the 113.4-Grammer. Someone should have given that answer to Samuel L. Jackson, in “Pulp Fiction,” who asked, “What’s do they call a Quarter-Pounder in France?” before blowing people away.
    It used to be that the speedometers of all American vehicles displayed both English and metric scales for speed. My Ford has only the English units; my PT has both.
    In the late ‘70s, when I was at the University of Missouri Journalism School, all of us had to work for the campus daily, the Columbia Missourian.
    A newspaper adviser had just lost 75 pounds (34 kilos) and because of that required the rest of us to “try to educate the public in metrics; after all, soon that’ll be all that people use.”
    Commenting on her dramatic weight loss as we inched past her desk also helped our grades — by degrees.
    I think her loss of poundage (er, kilogramage) prompted her to effect the reporting change in all our articles. Her officiousness made many of us students declare, “You give her 2.54 centimeters, she’ll take 1,609.34 meters.”
    Accordingly, in our reporting, we could use pounds, inches, feet, yards, ounces, etc., but only in direct quotes. Whenever we wrote on weights, lengths and distances we needed to convert them first.
    Thus, we weren’t allowed to write, “She lives a half mile away.” We’d have to write in stead, “She lives .67 kilometers away,” and then we were allowed to fill in the English measurement parenthetically (like this).
    As luck would have it, the adviser’s name was Rose, and those of us old enough to remember the old song, dubbed her “Metricali Rose.” She liter-ally had no idea there was such a song.