When I was in fifth grade, we had to learn the metric system. We needed to know our hectares from our deciliters so we could take our place in the scientific forefront of multiplying things by 10.

As it turned out, Americans wouldn't touch the metric system with a three-meter pole.

We learned all our millis and decis and kilos, but our parents refused. In those days, sometimes the parents won these battles. If they had to remember how many feet make a mile, we weren't getting away with this European move-the-decimal-point laziness.

We smugly enjoy our quirky, antique units of measure, but the enemy has infiltrated. In a global economy, you can't keep your medieval artifacts nice.

You buy rice in pounds but drugs in kilograms, and a bottle of soda is 20 ounces but water is often a half liter (disguised as 16.9 ounces). Do you even remember a time before two-liter bottles of soda? What was the largest size before, a barrel?

We may have to reinstate the barrel. We're working toward considering the two-liter bottle a single serving.

Despite being next to metric Canada, we're ultimately going to end up like Great Britain. The UK began phasing in the metric system in 1965 but left the job unfinished and now gamely operates with a bifurcated jumble of Imperial and metric standards that could be comfortable only for the people who gave the world a pound worth 240 pence, 12 pence to the shilling and 20 shillings to the pound. They lost the American Colonies while attempting to make change from a stamp tax overpayment.

As my English e-penpal Kathryn explains, "Beer is in pints, speed is in mph, road sign distances are in miles, petrol is so many pence to the gallon [only when discussed in the media; on the signs in the stations, the price is in pence to the litre], cars get a certain number of miles to the gallon, and if you want to know what a newborn weighed, everyone says so many pounds and ounces." When the baby graduates to kilograms, there is perhaps a small ceremony.

If you order a pint of beer in an English pub, it's not even the same pint as we have here. An Imperial pint is slightly larger than ours; their gallon is bigger, too. The nerve of these people -- they invented the Imperial system back when they had an empire, and they inflicted it on us, their colonies, and then evidently they had the gall to CHANGE it so that units of measurement with the same name used by people speaking the same language are now different. And don't even get me started on avoirdupois, because that's French and covered in butter.

With its mania for rationalizing and decimalizing things like temperature, why doesn't the metric system divide time decimally? A day is a day, determined by the rotation of the Earth, but how about 20 hours to the day instead of 24 (twice around a 10-hour clock) and 100 minutes to the hour? That would divide the day into 2,000 minutes rather than 1,440, so every metric minute would have to be slightly shorter. Metric seconds, of which there would be just 10 to a minute, would obviously have to be a lot longer, so we'd have to subdivide them into deciseconds, which would be somewhat shorter than half of a current second. And when someone called you from another room, instead of saying "Just a second!" you could say, "Decisecond!"

Inconvenient? You bet. We don't even like new area codes. But the lesson of history is that nothing is set in stone -- and, as Kathryn will tell you, a stone is 14 pounds.