(How big is a yea, anyway?)

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It occurred to me this week, while burying another door-to-door salesman who wants to replace my roof, that mankind has spent an inordinate amount of time over the years doing two things: killing each other, and measuring stuff.

But since it’s nearly the holiday season, let’s play down the “killing each other” part, and focus on the measurements. Measuring stuff has been intriguing us for millennia: remember, Noah was able to build an ark to spec, and without being able to Google cubit.

Beyond the basic battle between gallons/yards/miles (the U.S.) and the metric system (the rest of the planet), humans have come up with a huge array of amounts, and ways of describing those amounts. For examples, here’s a short list of ways we can measure volume:

• a bushel
• a peck
• a passel
• a heap
• a bunch
• a buttload

According to the internet, a bushel is equal to 35.2 liters (or litres), which means if I want to know how much stuff makes up a bushel, I have to look up another measurement, from another country, to translate liters into pounds, or gallons, or miles, or megabytes, or whatever liters translates into.

A peck can be specific or not. It can mean one fourth of a bushel – which drags liters back into it – or it can simply mean a great many, as in “Gregory Quarter-Bushel starred in a great many movies” or “Peter Piper picked nearly nine liters of pickled peppers.”

A passel (bastardized in the 19th-century from parcel) just means a large number, as in “Gregory Peck starred in a passel of movies” or “John Kerry does not have a passel of facial expressions.”

The more subjective term “buttload” is an interesting unit of measurement. I’m not entirely sure when or why some person first decided to measure the average storable volume of someone’s backside, but I’m completely sure that I don’t want to know the details.

Then there’s the vague measurements, the uncommitteds:

• about
• more or less
• a bit
• I don’t know

Some measurements are no longer useful. For some reason, NASA is still comparing rockets to horses.

“In order to escape Earth’s gravity, the space shuttle generates 37 million horsepower.”

(Of course, 37 million horses would also generate a buttload of something else.)

Measuring distance, particularly when giving driving directions, also ends to lean toward the vague.

• “Go about a mile.”
• “Head down that road a piece.”
• “Well, it’s a ways from here.”

And then there’s the relative-distance measurement that’s really unfair because it requires some inside knowledge:

“Go about a mile past where Donny got shot.”

One of my personal favorites is “It’s about yea long.” This one usually requires an accompanying hand gesture, unless you’re talking about the space shuttle. (“What, the shuttle? Oh, it’s about twelve thousand yeas long.”)

The need to measure how ugly someone is (and share it) can be handy, and has resulted in some odd turns of a phrase. One person might be butt-ugly, and the next one is ugly as homemade sin. And then there’s the weird one, the creative one, the seeming contradiction:

“Well, he’s got money,” she admitted after the blind date, “but he was pretty ugly.”

Another way of describing measurements is to paint a mental picture. This technique is often used in mainstream media news analysis, statistics, and other lies. Examples:

• If you stacked up twenty trillion one-dollars bills, the stack would reach beyond the moon. And then the IRS would take half of them.
• If all the mail successfully delivered on time by the US Post Office was laid end to end, the line would stretch about yea long.
• If Bill Clinton laid all the women in Washington end to end, I wouldn’t be a bit surprised.

Finally, there’s the rare homespun measurement “mess,” as in “Granny done boiled up a mess of kale. Go kill me a chicken.” Colorful, to be sure, but, sadly, there seem to be so few opportunities anymore where mess is the best term of measurement.

• “I’ve rebooted the server. Now it has a mess of memory.”
• John Kerry got the Iranians to agreed on spinning down a number of centrifuges; the official number is thought to be somewhere between a mess and a passel.
• “My, look at skinny Oprah! What’s she lost…a mess?”

Well, I hope those insights were helpful. Have a great week. I’ll see you in about yea long.