The Odd Clauses by Jay Wexler Page A

do? By all accounts, one thing the members did a lot of was fight with one another. This was almost inevitable, since the Metric Conversion Act that created the board required the president to appoint people representing all sorts of different interests, some (like scientists or educators) in favor of metric conversion, and others (like labor unions and consumers) that were against the idea. This congressional restriction on the president’s appointment power is itself constitutionally questionable, but Presidents Ford and Carter went along with it and appointed a lot of people to the board who didn’t think much of switching to the metric system. No surprise, then, that the board did not insist on any kind of radical change.
    The board did do
some
stuff. It issued publications, aired radio and television public-service announcements, and held town-hall-like meetings to persuade people how great the metric system could be. It urged gas stations to start dispensing gasoline by the liter instead of the gallon, and many stations complied. Other little changes came about at around the same time. Signs on the side of highways, for instance, started showing the distance to upcoming cities in both miles and kilometers (they still do, in some places nearthe Canadian border). Fifths of liquor—named because the bottle held a fifth of a gallon of liquid—were reformulated to hold 750 milliliters instead (the new bottles held only 0.2 ounces less than the old ones). Consciousness about the metric system among the general public was undoubtedly raised.
    For the most part, though, the board did little and was subject to lots of public ridicule. On
Saturday Night Live,
for instance, Dan Aykroyd played a government spokesman explaining the new ten-letter “decabet”—an alphabet made out of only ten letters, including A, B, C, and D (“our most popular letters”); an E-F combo written sort of like a hangman’s noose; a smushed-together “GHI” letter; a similarly mashed together “LMNO” letter (“a boon to those who always thought that ‘LMNO’ was one letter anyway”); and one letter representing all of the so-called trash letters from P through Z. “Ten letters, ten fingers,” Aykroyd’s bureaucrat explains, beaming into the camera. “Simple, isn’t it?” He finishes the skit by working through some examples of how words will be pronounced under the new system (“mucus,” for instance, becomes “lmnoucus”) and then singing the new version of the now somewhat shorter ABC song.
    With a public reception like this, it was no surprise when Ronald Reagan disbanded the board in 1982. The details of the board’s demise are interesting. According to a column written by former National Public Radio president Frank Mankiewicz shortly after the death of Ronald Reagan’s close assistant Lyn Nofziger in 2006, Mankiewicz had sent Nofziger a column back in 1981 “attacking and satirizing the attempt by some organized do-gooders to inflict the metric system on Americans.” This was one position—perhaps the only position—that the conservative Nofziger and the liberal Mankiewicz could agree on, and Mankiewicz reports that Nofziger used the column and other materials the two put together to “prevail on the president to dissolve the commission and make sure that, at least in the Reaganpresidency, there would be no further effort to sell metric.” The two were delighted, but, as Mankiewicz recalls, it was a “victory . . . which we recognized would have to be shared only between the two of us, lest public opinion once again began to head toward metrification.”
    In September 1982, the poor Metric Board issued its final report. Among its conclusions? The policy of having two measuring systems is “confusing to all segments of American society.” The perception that metric conversion would be