Units

You often hear phrases such as “blind as a bat” or “soft as silk,” but nobody has ever attempted to define all these units. So I will. Here’s my list of informal units:

• Loons of craziness
• Silks of softness
• Bats of blindness
• Buttons of cuteness. This scale is logarithmic to allow for extremely low cutenesses.
• Helens of beauty. You know, Helen of Troy, “the face that launched a thousand ships.” (This means that one milliHelen is defined as the beauty required to launch one ship.)
• Pies of easiness. (Alternate units include “as easy as 1-2-3” and “as easy as 2 plus 2”.)
• Hatters of madness/insanity.
• Dogs of sickness.
• Mules of stubbornness.
• Lambs of gentleness.
• Fiddles of fitness.
• Long-tailed cats near a rocking chair of nervousness.
• Greased lightnings of speed.
• Posts of deafness.
• Doornails of deadness.
• Rocks of dumbness.
• Tree trunks of thickness.
• Clams of happiness.
• Beets of redness.
• Turtles of social awkwardness.
• “Hell” forms an interesting wildcard unit — things can be “hot as hell”, “loud as hell”, “crazy as hell”, and so on.

Suggestions for calibrations for the units are welcome.