How to measure things when you're too idle to do it properly.

Let’s say that you need to measure some stuff, right now.
Right now, let’s say that you have to know the size or the weight of… Oh, I don’t know - this magazine, say. Don’t ask me why – just say you have to.
Before you start, you need to ask yourself this: can I really be arsed to do this thing properly right now?
If you can, you’ll need to go off now and get some things: a ruler, some scales, a life, and so on.
But if you can’t, then you’re what is known as ‘normal,’ and this article is for you.
Most of us, most of the time, have better things to think about. There’s always a strong temptation to bodge and guess when it comes to measuring, and to rely on rules of thumb that sort of get us to roughly what we want to know. This has always been so, all around the world; and because it has, every country has ended up with what are known as ‘traditional measures’ – which, mostly, are the ‘rules-of-thumb’ that have stuck: the ones that have worked well enough for long enough by generations of normal people who can’t be bothered to do it ‘properly’.
Let’s start with a thumb-sized rule, to show you what I mean. Put your thumb down flat, make a mark either side of your knuckle, and, for an average-sized male hand, what you’ve got is what most cultures call a ‘thumb’ (or pouce, dum, or pulgada) but which we call an inch. Most countries use inch-diameter plumbing: you can stick your thumb down the hole to stop the water.
Going a bit bigger, put your hand down flat, mark the width at the widest part, where your thumb joins, and what you have is a hand, or four inches. You can use it to ‘walk’ up the legs of your livestock, if you have any, or else up your walls to work out where to knock nails in – especially in America, where the wooden studs behind the plaster are four hands apart.
Bigger still, if you take off your shoe, you’ll find that the width of your hand fits into the length of it three times – which makes twelve inches. And if your feet are average size (75% of men take an 8,9 or 10) then the sole of your shoe will be pretty much the same size as the ‘official’ foot (or pied or fuss, or even kanejaku ). You can use it to pace out a room, or a field. If you’re a woman, you’ll need leave a slight gap between your steps: for small feet - size five, say - leave two thumbs’ width, and for size sevens leave just one.
You can weigh stuff, too, without equipment. Just hold something you know the weight of in one hand, and something else in the other. For the thing you know the weight of, try a nice smooth stone that fills the palm of your hand snugly so that your fingers curl around but don’t quite touch. Or else some fruit – a handful of apples, say. Either way you’ll be holding roughly a pound (or livre or pfund). Pounds vary a little from culture to culture, but not by nearly as much as you might think; and no-one at all seems to have gone anywhere near as big as the kilogramme - apart from the metric system, that is. If you want to know why this should be, try picking up a kilogramme of loose apples without dropping any. Using both hands doesn’t make it any easier, either.
Volume: a comfortable mouthful of liquid will roughly fill an espresso-cup. Half of that is a fluid ounce. You can fit more in, but it starts to hurt at the back of your throat. A really painfully-full mouthful is half a cup, one average-sized glass of wine, or four ounces. Four of these make a US pint, and five make a UK pint.
But if you offer people drinks measured out like this they tend, I find, to run away. There’s a lesson in that, even: if they sprint, flat out, there comes a point where they can’t keep it up any longer and either slow down or collapse. If you follow them, sharpish, with a tape-measure, you’ll note that this distance is an eighth of a mile. This, as it happens, is a furlong, the distance the ancient Romans called a stadium and used for their running-tracks.
So next time someone asks you to measure something, it’s a simple choice: either get off your backside and fetch a ruler, or end up gasping by the roadside in a pool of your own vomit, pursued by a nutter waving a pint-glass in one hand and a tape-measure in the other.