“One of my jobs as a kid was handing wrenches to my father and older brothers. On any given bolt or nut, the half-inch wrench was a good bet, and if that was too small, the next to try was the five-eighths. If that in turn was too big, maybe we needed a nine-sixteenths. If nothing fit — a frustrating occurrence that happened often enough — we’d curse and say it had to be metric” (John Bemelmans Marciano, Whatever Happened to the Metric System? 4).