What they got instead was "Coke" sweetened with corn syrup rather than sugar. Most people still believe that Classic Coke is old Coke even though it isn't.

This was one of the greatest and least understood swindles in the history of food.

Another that's similar – and automotive – is the transition (to use that loathsome word) from measuring and identifying engines via their displacement in cubic inches to liters instead. This has served to homogenize engines by making them all seem the same, kind of like old Coke sweetened with cane sugar and Coke Classic with HFC.

Think of all the new cars – they are mostly crossovers now – that have 2.0 liter engines irrespective of them being different engines. The parts used to make a VW 2.0 liter four do not interchange with an Infiniti 2.0 liter four and yet both are "2.0 liter fours" and it sure sounds the same, doesn't it?

It used to be that – in America – we didn't use the metric system. Kind of like we didn't play soccer – or call that "football."

That was part of what made America different from Europe and Asia. The metric system is a relic of the French Revolution. The radical egalitarians – i.e., the Communists – who were its leaders imposed the metric system because it was uniform; that is, all the same. This is what Communists like. The metric system may be more mathematically sensible than inches and pounds and feet and yards and cubic inches but something gets lost in the translation.

America, for instance.

It is now much more like the rest of the world because it uses the same androgynous metric system as the rest of the world. Not yet officially and not yet mandatory. But it's been pushed on us nevertheless and nowhere else more so than under the hood. This began to happen sometime in the mid-1970s. That's when American car companies began to denote the size of engines in liters rather than cubic inches. Previously, it was the rule to herald the size of engines – in particular, V8 engines – in cubic inches rather than liters. For example, the famous Dodge/Plymouth 426 Hemi V8. Just saying that summons emotions that don't arise when one says 5.7 liters – the size of the modern Hemi (most of them). Chevy also makes a 5.7 liter V8 but it is not the same engine as the Dodge/Plymouth 5.7 V8.

The Metric denotations make them sound the same, though.