Metric Poetry
Common words for SI
It's been said that metric is good for accuracy but imperial is better for poetry.
You don't have to be a poet to see that's clearly an indictment of metric units being rather cumbersome when spoken. Nobody ever says, "You missed by a kilometer" or "We're making progress centimeter by centimeter". Official metric units might sound graceful in say French, but they certainly don't in English.
It's time to shed some syllables and beautify these clumsy metric tongue twisters.
Table of Metric Common Words
| Symbol | Unit | Word | Examples |
|---|---|---|---|
mm | millimeter | mil | "I was a mil away from death." |
cm | centimeter | cem | "We're making progress cem by cem." "The President mustn't budge a cem." |
m | meter | met | "Visibility is down to a few mets." |
km | kilometer | klick or kay | "Give someone a cem and they'll take a klick." "A journey of a thousand klicks begins with a single step." "Good grief, you missed by a country klick!" "Go the extra klick." "Only mets away but klicks apart." |
mg | milligram | mig | "A raindrop weighs just 4 migs." |
g | gram | gram | "A gram of prevention is worth a kilo of cure." |
kg | kilogram | kilo or key | "Coke is the 500 kilo gorilla in the soft drink market." "A gram of help is better than a kilo of preaching." "Sugar Ray Robinson is the greatest kilo-for-kilo boxer of all time." |
Mg | megagram | ton | "That's gonna land on you like a ton of bricks." |
ml | milliliter | mil or cc | "20 raindrops make a mil." "A mil is the volume of one cubic cem (1 cm3)." "A cc is the volume of one cubic cem (1 cm3)." |
L | liter | leat | "A cube 10 cems on edge is one leat." "A mil of honey will catch more flies than a leat of vinegar." "I love milk - I drink leats of the stuff." |
ML | megaliter | meg | "A cube 10 mets on edge is one meg." "An Olympic-size swimming pool is about 2.5 megs." |
Notes
- These shortened common words are for casual spoken usage and make sense when written for song lyrics, novels, and screenplays. Regular text should still use correct metric units, like "5 km" and "20 ml".
- The word "mil" is overloaded. Since a "mil" can be either a millimeter or a milliliter, the meaning needs to be determined from context. A better word for millimeter would be "mim", but that ship has already sailed. No one is ever going to say that a Glock is a 9 mim.
- Never use the lesser known in-between unit terms, like hectometer, centiliter, or decagram, as they are useless. There's no reason to be poetic about it — only a moron would say "3 decagrams" instead of "30 grams".
-
Avoid the Latin gibberish of the extreme prefixes except in scientific domains.
For example, write "90,000 km" instead of "90 Mm". Or even use exponents, such as "3 × 1021 m" instead of "3 Zm".
A zettameter is Greek to everyone (except the Greeks).
Seriously, exactly ZERO normal people are going to memorize even a quarter of this prefix gibberish:
quetta (Q) 1030, ronna (R) 1027, yotta (Y) 1024, zetta (Z) 1021, exa (E) 1018, peta (P) 1015, tera (T) 1012, giga (G) 109, mega (M) 106, kilo (k) 103, hecto (h) 102, deka (d) 10-1, centi (c) 10-2, milli (m) 10-3, micro (ฮผ) 10-6, nano (n) 10-9, pico (p) 10-12, femto (f) 10-15, atto (a) 10-18, zepto (z) 10-21, yocto (y) 10-24, ronto (r) 10-27, and quecto (q) 10-30 quetta (Q) 1030, ronna (R) 1027, yotta (Y) 1024, zetta (Z) 1021, exa (E) 1018, peta (P) 1015, tera (T) 1012, giga (G) 109, mega (M) 106, kilo (k) 103, hecto (h) 102, deka (d) 10-1, centi (c) 10-2, milli (m) 10-3, micro (ฮผ) 10-6, nano (n) 10-9, pico (p) 10-12, femto (f) 10-15, atto (a) 10-18, zepto (z) 10-21, yocto (y) 10-24, ronto (r) 10-27, and quecto (q) 10-30 - Variety is the spice of life. In some regions people may prefer "kay" over "klick" for kilometer. Some may prefer "key" over "kilo" for kilogram. Local language variations are totally fine.
Klicks of Inspiration
"Your klickage may vary." — U.S. EPA after metrication
"It's not the years, honey, it's the klickage." — Correct canonical version of Indiana Jones
"Knowledge without klickage doesn't mean anything to me." — Henry Rollins if he had been born in Australia
"Take your dream and start breaking in down into klickstones." — A Pragmatic Person
"My path has not been determined. I shall have more experiences and pass many more klickstones." — Agnetha Fรคltskog in the future
"Life isn't a matter of klickstones, but of moments." — Modern-day clone of Rose Kennedy
"Remember to celebrate klickstones as you prepare for the road ahead." — Even more visionary Nelson Mandela
Chicken or the Egg
One way to jump start the use of Metric Common Words is to start using them today with explanatory links.
Link to this web page: think-metric.org/poetry
In HTML this would look like:
<p>Compared to dealing with inches and annoying fractions, metric is better by a
<a href=https://think-metric.org/poetry>country klick</a>.</p>
Poetic
Trying to rhyme and rhythm with "centimeter" would paralyze even the greatest poet. On the other hand, "cem" pairs up nicely with a variety of other words, like gem, stem, them, item, hem, and mayhem.
You may not be a poet of metric, but you know these easy common words are indeed electric.