Besides inches, feet, meters and gallons, there are many unusual, usually vague, sometimes fanciful units of measure.
Unit Example
Sitting - He will eat 2 pizzas at one sitting.
Serving - Calories/serving: 200. Servings per 2oz. bag of chips: 5.
Household - Limit one coupon per household.
Batch - When it rained at the bake sale, we lost 5 batches of cookies.
A pinch.
As in, a pinch of salt.
Round - a round of golf, also a round of drinks
A few from the Jargon File:
microfortnight, a unit of time. (There are also references to a microcentury, attoparsec, nanoacre and milliHelen, the amount of beauty required to launch one ship.)
microLenat, a unit of bogosity.
milliLampson, a unit of talking speed.
And every MIT student should be familiar with the Smoot. In 1958 students measured the Harvard Bridge using classmate Oliver Smoot as their unit of length. The bridge is 364.4 Smoots and 1 ear long. Every year since then students have gone out to the bridge to repaint the Smoot numbers.
Well, in archaeology, we have a unit called TFD. Anything 50x50 cm square that you have to dig deeper than like 90 cm or so is Too Fuckin’ Deep, cuz you can barely reach the bottom.
Ok, so TFD is just something we made up. But still.
Links and Chains
Metes and Bounds
Not just MIT students. I grew pretty familiar with smoots in high school track when a common four-mile run often took us across that bridge. Also, I bike over it from time to time. And of course there are the other additions, such as “heaven” at 69, and “halfway to Hell” at the halfway point.
milliHelen - the exact amount of beauty necessary to launch 1 ship.
The hogshead (sometimes known as a “weekend at the cottage”).
A similar measurement was performed at Caltech in 1937, when it was determined that the distance from Throop Hall on campus to the Pasadena City Hall was five thousand six hundred seventy-eight mackerel. You just don’t get freshman pledge tasks like that anymore (thankfully).
My wife just reminded me of another one: the kan, a unit of modesty. Named after physicist Robert Millikan, who was apparently a rather arrogant guy.
Back in a jiffy.
The Planck Stupidity (h[sub]duh[/sub]): The point at which mental density becomes great enough to suck the intelligence out of the surrounding space.
The ell, an old English unit equal to 45 inches, is a favorite of crossword puzzle designers everywhere.
I love the ancient Japanese measurement system. Some of them use ridiculously nonstandardizable measures like the amount of rice you can fit in one bamboo joint. The only one I think is in common use today, unaltered, is the shu. Sake is sold by the shu, it’s a big 1.8 liter bottle. Gotta love those non-metric systems!
Japanese rooms and apartments are often measured by the number of standard-size tatami mats it takes to cover the floor. Eight-mat rooms, twelve-mat rooms, etc.
Back home in Texas, my mother often adds a “skosh” of some spice to what she’s cooking. That comes from Japanese. She sometimes adds just a “smidgeon,” but I don’t know where that comes from.
“The metric system is the tool of the devil! My car gets forty rods to the hogshead and that’s the way I likes it!” – Grandpa Simpson
Th3e definitive site for units: http://www.unc.edu/~rowlett/units/index.html
How about…
A loaf.
A carafe.
A bucketfull.
A “yay”. <holding hands apart to approximate size> “That fish was about yay long!”
A mouthfull
A handfull
An armload.
A drawerfull
A little bit.
Down the road a piece
A “powerful” <Southern term, meaning unusually excessive> “it’s powerful hot!” “that’s powerful heavy!”
A shitload
A tub (of lard, butter, bathwater, etc)
A shovelfull
A pot (of spaghetti, soup, etc. or for houseplants)
A smidgen
A box (of dishes, newspapers, packing peanuts, etc.)
the number of metal balls of diamater = to the diameter of the barrel of the gun required to make up 1lb in lead.
( that’s how i understand it anyway)
Pretty wierd huh. feel free to correct me, i am naive and silly.
:D