I heard this in the supermarket today:

Here I stand, head in hand, turned my face to the wall.
If she's gone, I can't go on, feelin' two-foot small.
'Hey! you've got to hide your love away.'

Somehow, 'feelin' .609 meters tall' just lacks poetic power.
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The people who worked on measurement systems back in the 18th C could easily have made the meter and the yard be equal, but ooooh no. The English and the French have to be different.

Now everybody else is paying for it.