Americans Will Use Anything to Measure but the Metric System, and the Examples Are Spectacular This Year

The American refusal to use the metric system has, by accident, produced one of the most reliable comedic genres in international media coverage. The numbers, by themselves, would be standard. The country is just stubborn enough to translate every single measurement into something else, and the something else is, almost always, an object that the rest of the world has to look up. The funny american measurement memes that come out of this practice are essentially the international community quietly losing its mind in public, and the public losing has been ongoing for decades.

What makes the genre particularly satisfying is how creatively the measurements escalate. A reasonable person, asked to describe a meteor crater, might use meters. An American news outlet, presented with the same crater, will instead describe it in football fields, school buses, blue whales, or, in one notable case, baby elephants combined with a corgi. The metric system memes circulating online are essentially documentary records of this exact tendency, where the available units of measurement have expanded to include essentially anything that has a recognizable size.

There’s also a strong recurring subgenre involving celebrity-based measurements. The height of an object expressed in Empire State Buildings. The volume of a person’s name expressed in Bobby Browns versus Millie Bobby Browns. The hilarious metric memes operating in this space are essentially the most American thing that has ever been published, and the rest of the world is keeping a list.

The broader thing this whole genre captures, beyond the obvious mockery, is the very specific cultural commitment some countries have to refusing perfectly serviceable systems for no particular reason. The metric system is, by every available measure, simpler, more consistent, and easier to teach. The American refusal to use it is not based on any practical objection. It is based on cultural inertia, mild stubbornness, and the very specific commitment that the country has, historically, applied to systems that other countries figured out first.

There’s also a small affection worth naming in how the rest of the world handles this. The countries that did adopt the metric system have not, mostly, abandoned diplomatic relations with the United States. They have, instead, learned to live with the football-field measurements and the school-bus comparisons. The funny measurement memes that emerge from this tension are essentially small acts of international comedy, where the rest of the world has agreed to find it funny rather than annoying.

The country uses corgis as a unit. The corgis are doing fine. The metric system, technically, is still right there.