It always annoys me when TV narrators measure distances in football fields. I know how far 100 yards is, thank you very much. (Although it’s been so long since I’ve actually been on a football field that I find it easier to picture it as the length of a rifle range.)
But I just heard one sink to a new low. He was talking about building some big steel structure and how it had to be lined up just so, “within an inch - that’s about the width of three pencils.” :rolleyes:
Next thing you know they’ll be saying, “It took seven days to build. That’s about the time from one weekend to the next.” and “There were ten people there. That’s as many people as you have fingers!”.
People are mostly visually-oriented (unless you’re blind). If I tell you something is 450 yards long can you instantly and accurately picture it without comparing it to anything? If so you’re a rare snowflake. Numerical measurements are inherently intangible and pretty meaningless without some sort of mental marker to compare them against, especially when talking about really big and really small numbers. But in your mind’s eye, you can see a football field, so when you think of 4.5 football fields you get a better sense of exactly how far that distance really is.
It’s a bit unusual to visually explain an inch but not really anything to get worked up over. In that case he’s trying to make a point about precision and saying “within an inch” is such a common phrase most people won’t stop to think about how small a distance that really is. He wanted to force a visualization for greater impact.
Basically, it’s not that they’re talking down to you, they’re just better communicators than you.
Not being into sport, especially American sport, I have no idea how big a football field is. Especially since there are about six different sports all called “football” and they each have different sized fields.
100 yards, plus an extra 10 yards in each end zone. And there’s only one sport called football, the rest are either called “X football”, like “Australian Rules Football” or “Arena Football”, or are soccer, which is only called football by foreigners.
The fact that the narrator thinks he has to explain to me what 100 yards or 1 inch is is silly- I can figure out how many football fields that is without his help.
The problem is that the English system makes that big jump from yards to miles–a jump by a factor of 1,760. There’s nothing in between except for the delightful furlong, which has unfortunately fallen out of use.
People can visualize one yard or one mile, but it’s hard to visualize 370 yards, so the football-field has emerged as the de facto intermediate measurement. The problem is, I’m never sure whether they’re counting the end zones.
But telling people how wide an inch is . . . that’s barbaric. If I don’t know how big an inch is, I probably don’t know how wide a pencil is.
The metric system suffers from this same “problem”, actually. When was the last time you saw something measured in decameters or hectometers? Which sort of tells me it’s not a problem after all.