After living for well over half a century in this land of exceptionalisms I have made some observations that have left me puzzled if not bewildered. I want to share some of these American idiosyncrasies with you.
Units of Measurement
We all know the centuries-old resistance of the US to adopt the metric system – now embodied in modified and more scientifically rigorous form in the International System of units (SI). That resistance is, of course, another manifestation of irrational exceptionalism. Even the UK, from where the American anachronisms originated, has largely abandoned those inches, feet, miles, pounds (weight), degrees Fahrenheit, etc. for the logically constructed units that the rest of world has adopted. One hold out that the world seems to have capitulated to, however, is the measure of airplane altitude: feet, apparently because of the early world-wide dominance of American avionics.
It is pertinent to recall that, although Thomas Jefferson had initially endorsed the idea of a standard meter, his early version of American chauvinism won out when he was informed that this unit was going to be based on meridian measurements in France.
Even more peculiar is the fact that in the US we are now served with a totally irrational mixture of units. For example, take a container of some food, say a box of cereal. The net weight is given in ounces but the nutrition label provides information on the typical portion content of salt and protein and sugars, etc. in… grams or milligrams. Talking about those genuinely metric units, we buy our medicines labelled with those same ‘foreign’ units. Who would even think of aspirin doses measured in ounces? Further to the nutrition labels on foodstuffs, one of the most peculiar unit is used for the energy content of a typical portion: the all-important calories. What is a calorie? It is defined in the most old-fashioned metric-based way: the amount of energy required to raise the temperature of a gram of water by one degree Celsius. But wait, that is not even what the American calorie signifies. Our calorie is really called a kilocalorie which is equal to one thousand (genuine) calories. I call this an extreme case of quantitative euphemism (who would want to be told that the cheeseburger being consumed sets him/her back by one million calories!). So, in summary, in this case, we are using the wrong definition of an old-fashioned metric unit which, by the way, is no longer used in the rest of the world. The correct SI unit of the energy content of food is the kilojoule.
The same inconsistency applies to the totally pervasive use of electrical units. Americans don’t even consider that there could be ‘English’ units of power, electric current intensity, potential difference, electric resistance, etc. We all use watts, amperes, volts, ohms, etc. for those parameters. The problem is that these fully accepted SI units can not readily be related to the English units of mass and length (the poundal and the yard, believe or not). The watt, for example, in the basic SI units, is equivalent to the product of kilograms times meters squared, divided by seconds cubed. This disconnect is not helpful when students are learning science because they are less likely to have a sense of the dimensional relationship of these important electrical units.
Another case in point is that of the measure of volume. For example, for our car we buy gasoline at the pump in gallons but we do not bat an eye when the pistons’ displacement in that same car’s engine is measured in liters or in cubic centimeters. We buy milk by either liquid ounces or fractions of a gallon, but wine is sold in 3/4-liter bottles (better get drunk on liters than gallons?). So much for logical consistency, or is it inconsistent exceptionalism?
What about the measure of temperature. In the US we use degrees Fahrenheit. Who the hell was Fahrenheit? Daniel Gabriel Fahrenheit (1686 – 1736) was a physicist, inventor, and scientific instrument maker, born in Poland to a family of German extraction. And don’t even ask me why the two points of the Fahrenheit scale where established: 0 degreesis the freezing point of some concoction of a solution of brine made from a mixture of water, ice, and ammonium chloride. The upper point was then defined as the boiling point of water — believe or not — 180 degrees above the freezing point of pure water (32 0F). This scale is only used in the US and a few Caribbean islands. Though the United Kingdom changed to degrees Celsius, Fahrenheit is sometimes still used in newspaper headlines to sensationalize heatwaves (!).
When an American wants to express, for example, the length of a ship, the wingspan of an airliner, the size of a city block, etc. he (more than she, I suspect) uses the ‘football field‘ as a unit of length which, to me, provides as much clarity as an ancient Greco-Roman ‘stadium‘ with which distances were measured 2,000 years ago. Go tell the average European that he needs to walk a ‘football field’ to get to the nearest pharmacy and he will either be bewildered or think you are referring to a soccer field. Fortunately, astronomers worldwide (including Americans) have all agreed on the same units: the AU (average distance between the Earth and the Sun), the lightyear, and the parsec (Google it if you don’t know its definition).
Numbers
The whole world agrees on what a million signifies. But, what is an American billion? In the UK that is a ‘thousand million’, in Spanish it is also ‘mil milliones’, in German it is ‘milliarde’, and so on. The quantity one billion in the UK, in Spanish, German, etc. is equivalent to one trillion in….America, of course. As far as I know, in the entire world – except the US – one billion is equivalent to one million million (hence one billion). We thought Americans think bigger than others! By the way, the same confusion then extends to the trillion and beyond.
When it comes to expressing decimal fractions, in the US we use a period as separator. For example, 2.56 means 2 plus 56/100. In most of the world this would be written with a comma, i.e., as 2,56. For the separation between thousands we use the comma (e.g., 7,541,268). In most of the world this number will be written as 7.541.268. Where does this curious inversion of the uses of periods and commas come from?
Our Country’s Name
When I lived in South America, we were convinced that we lived in… America. When I came to the US I discovered that Americans are the inhabitants of only this country. The rest of the souls of the Western Hemisphere are either Canadians or Latinos. Now, Where does the name America come from in the first place? Most scholars agree that that name is the feminine of the Latin version of the given name of the Italian explorer Amerigo Vespucci (1454 – 1512) who appears to have been one of the first European to have visited most of the eastern coast of South America, what is now Brazil. As far as we know, he never saw or even knew about the existence of North America. So, now we have the US arrogating itself the name of United States of America when the original definition of America did not even include this land. I call this a form of imperialistic nomenclature[1]: Dismiss all those original Vespucci Americans, relabel them as Latinos (or Hispanics) and take over their name. No wonder, they don’t like us down there. This misnomering even extends to the native inhabitants of the US. They are, or at least were until recently, called Indians. That was the name given by Columbus and his crew to the Caribbean aborigines under the mistaken impression that they had landed somewhere near India. By the time the Europeans established themselves in North America, they were quite aware that this was not Asia but a new, hitherto unknown, continent that had nothing to do with India. So why North American Indians?
Eating and Drinking Habits
My first impression when witnessing the table manners of Americans (those of the US) was that they were all kind of dyslexic when it came to using fork and knife. I was totally astonished and mesmerized by their complicated two-hand juggling of those eating utensils. Again, nowhere else on this planet do people eat like that. How? Americans start by using the fork in the left hand and the knife in the right and proceed to cut a piece of meat (which they preferentially consume), then, comes the switch: the knife is dropped on the table and the fork, with the piece of meat, is passed to the right hand and into the diner’s mouth. Subsequently, the fork is returned to the left hand and the knife is picked up with the right hand and the process is repeated. Astonishing! No wonder sandwiches and chopsticks have become so widespread in the US. When I travel outside of our country that fork-knife juggling performance is a dead giveaway for me to recognize a dining American. Again, where did this idiosyncratic eating habit come from?
Talking about sandwiches, when I open my mouth as wide as I can, the gap between my upper and lower teeth is about 1 1/2 inches. On the other hand, I’ve been faced with the daunting task to consume sandwiches whose vertical dimension is around 3 inches. My solution? Upper level decapitation or attack by fork and knife. The average American however, seems to have no trouble consuming such gargantuan structures: an iron grip compresses the sandwich by about a half an inch and then the American mandible opens to accommodate the remaining dimension. How is that possible? I have a theory: recent evolutionary adaptation that keeps pace with the growing size of the average American sandwich, governed by the selective survival of those with cavernous mouths. Hail Darwin!
This is a land of extremes and this rule applies to the temperatures at which certain liquids are served. The pervasive availability of refrigeration has resulted in a distinct propensity to serve any cold drink at near freezing temperature. Ice is added in copious amounts – more often than not in quantities exceeding that of the liquid to be cooled – to any drink that is not to be consumed hot. As an inevitable result of the ice melting, the drink becomes diluted and tasteless unless you consume it with due alacrity which, in turn, forces you to order more of the beverage which is precisely the original intention of the server. This is called profit through thermodynamic manipulation.
Another puzzling American custom relates to the temperatures at which wines are served in many restaurants. Almost systematically, white wines are served at temperatures around 40 F whereas red wines are served at ‘room temperature’ which, in most restaurants is around 72 F, assuring that your Burgundy tastes like a vinegary soup. Waiters have looked at me in disbelief when I’ve asked them to warm my white and cool my red before I drink it.
[1] 2025: Latest incarnation of imperialistic nomenclature: the renaming of the Gulf of Mexico.
Pedro Lilienfeld 
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