Don’t forgwet The Period – when talking about tiny things, you always have to say something like “it would take 5 million of them to equal the size of the period at the end of this sentence.”
My favorite parody of this was a “Light elements” column in the old Oni magazine (I think). The article was on punctuation, and , talking about periods, they included the phrase “…each of these punctuations marks was so small that it would take one of them to equal the size of the period at the end of this sentence.”
How about the “fill the” unit of measure? For example, to build the 5th runway at Atlanta’s Hartsfield-Jackson airport, contractors will have to move enough dirt to fill the Georgia Dome 5 times.
The Falcons are having a decent season - why would anyone want to fill in the Georgia Dome now? I vote we move the dirt to Phillips Arena. The Hawks suck.
"It’s only three miles as the crow flies, but to get there you have to go 'round Robin Hood’s barn." I don’t know how big Sherwood Forest was, but I bet going 'round it was a fur piece. I live a long, long way from Sherwood Forest, and it’s possible Mom only used this expression because we’re Nottinghams.
So, if you ever lose Wales, it will be referred to as “an area the size of the yearly lost rainforest.”
Ha! That reminds me of my Fluids I professor in college. He measured the difficulty of exam problems by the number of Miller Lights it would take him to score that question on all of the test papers. A “Two Miller Light Problem” was particularly difficult.
I don’t think he was a drunk. I just thought he was cool.
Wasn’t the “bigger than a breadbox” expression used frequently on the old TV quiz show, “What’s My Line?” Although that doesn’t mean that’s where it originated, just where it was popularized.
Two measurements frequently used over here are " the height if x number of London double decker buses" or “so many time taller than the height of Nelson’s Column”
Regarding football fields , do they soccer , rugby or American footballs .
One measurement I use is to do with weight. I know that a bag of potatoes I buy from the farm shop is 25kg or about 56 lbs. So when I read , for instance, that a WW1 soldier carried nearly 60 lbs when “going over the top” I can visualize that and sympathize with him.
P. J. O’Rourke is pretty trenchant on this subject, in his own inimitable fashion: ‘The USS Mobile Bay is 567 feet long, almost four times as long as the Statue of Liberty would be if the Statue of Liberty were lying on its side and floating in the water {which makes no sense, but there are professional-writer bylaws requiring comparisons of this type whenever anything very large is being described}.’
‘The Mobile Bay’s “Welcome Aboard” pamphlet was full of Statue-of-Liberty-on-its-side style information. Building the ship “required enough steel to fabricate 4000 cars, aluminium sufficient to produce 26 million soft drink cans, over 200 miles of electrical cable…” There is enough fuel on board, the pamphlet said, “to run the family car nearly 25 million miles.” I always wish the people who figure these things out would just keep going: “The hawsers and bowlines carried aboard the Mobile Bay are long enough to hang every Democrat electedto Congress since Roosevelt’s second term. The synthetic rubber in the fire hoses would make enough prophylactics to allow every business executive in Japan to visit Manila. The ship’s bilge pumps could drain all the ecologically significant wetlands in Oregon in 24 hours.” And so on.’
Don’t joke - it’s still used in serious context. The landlord of my local was complaining that he could only order a particular beer from a wholesaler by the hogshead…althought the actual meaning seemed to be that they expected the beer to be unpopular, increasing wastage.
That’ll teach me to leave things logged on while I go to the pub
(Time between 11.20 and the last drink being drunk…now that’s a good measure of unpredictability)
Although you didn’t mention bags of sugar, which appeared on Top Gear today to weigh parts of a Porsche
Less we not forget Doug Adams’ contribution to Units of Measure with Cafe Mathematics which I can’t remember at this point, but I’m sure another doper knows verbatim.
