The Metric System Is Useless

In Songs and Poems

For making rockets and storing beans – among other scientific and industrial practices – the metric system is rather handy. But for songs and poems, it’s useless. It provides accurate measurements but lacks resonant words. Kilometre, litre, kilogram — these are not terms that make the heart palpitate.

The best evidence for this is the absence of these terms from songs and poems. Can you recall any passages that include metric measurements? The only one I remember is from Les Murray’s “The Glory and Decline of Bread,” which opens with the lines “Sliced bread (sic) / a centimeter thick”.

Metric measurements evoke nothing and aren’t groovy. Notice how the following songs would be inert if they used metric equivalents:

Shakespeare provides ample evidence for the lyricism of customary measures:

• "Am I not an inch of fortune better than she?” (Anthony and Cleopatra, 1.2.59)

• “They’ll give him death by inches” (Coriolanus, 5.4.38)

• “Not an inch further” (Henry IV Part 1, 2.3.117)

• “Yet for your part, it not appears to me / Either from the King or in the present time / That you should have an inch of any ground / To build a grief on…” (Henry IV Part 2, 4.1.105-108)

• “Away, you three-inch fool!” (The Taming of the Shrew, 4.1.23)

• “The letter is too long by half a mile” (Love’s Labour’s Lost, 5.2.54)

• “I have known when he would have walked ten mile afoot to see a good armour” (Much Ado About Nothing, 2.3.15-16)

• “He’ll dance the morris twenty mile an hour” (Two Noble Kinsmen, 5.2.49)

• “But ah, thought kills me that I am not thought / To leap large lengths of miles when thou art gone” (Sonnet 44)

• “How heavy do I journey on the way, / When what I seek (my weary travel’s end) / Doth teach that ease and that repose to say / Thus far the miles are measured from thy friend.” (Sonnet 50)

And the famous line from King Lear:

“Ay, every inch a king.” (4.4.107)

There’s nothing outdated about these customary measurements. The best twentieth-century poets used them. Here’s Les Murray again in his poem “The Quality of Sprawl”: “Sprawl is doing your farming by aeroplane, roughly, / or driving a hitchiker that extra hundred miles home.”

One of the most famous endings in a twentieth-century poem eschews the metric system:

The woods are lovely, dark and deep,
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.

Besides being lifeless, metric measurements barely rhyme with anything. It’s relatively hard to rhyme in English (compared to some other languages), so poets and songwriters should cherish their rhyming words. I’m sure you can think of many words that rhyme with foot, inch, pound, mile. What rhymes with kilometre? I’ve only been able to find one example of a metric rhyme, and even then it depends on a homophone: in his poem “Shadow Line,” Stephen Edgar rhymes “meters” (the measuring devices) with “St. Peter’s”. (In the same poem he finds a word to rhyme with “regolith,” — Mr Edgar is an extraordinary rhymer and few others can match his talent.)

So, anyone concerned with songs and poems should preserve customary measures and the rich idioms and rhymes they provide. Of course, the metric zealots aren’t concerned with such things, but I refuse to yield any ground. As the old saying goes: give them 2.54 centimetres and they’ll take 1.609 kilometres.

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