[arghwhat]

As a European born and raised in metric units, all I can do is shake my head and sigh...

... But as we speak about metric measurements I doubt that the US insistence on weird units apply. The average US citizen would presumably be confronted with "mega" and "giga" in their day-to-day lives, and millimeter, micrometer and nanometer are commonly used. Even femtosecond is a common, practical unit that anyone receiving refractive surgery will hear.

Picometer is unpopular because it only makes sense for sub-atomic lengths giving it few practical uses at the current time, not because "pico" is hard to grasp.

Also note that German, Dutch, Danish (my native tongue), Swedish, Norwegian, even Hindi and presumably many others also refer to the unit as "meter", so that particular disagreement is not "the US against the rest of the world".

(All languages have quirks - in Danish, we call a folding ruler in meters an "inch stick", and say the number "53" as "3 and half three's twenties" (skipping the "twenties" part in modern speech). Learn to enjoy the differences rather than hate on them.)