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.
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