3 months ago
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BOOK SALE: two words I can’t resist. Recently, the phrase worked its spell in Hobart, drawing me into a pavilion a stone’s throw from the Derwent. Trestle tables groaned with self-help and espionage, War and Peace, romance and cookery.
Yet the detail to catch my eye was a brisk explainer. The sign showed a stack of books beside an upright ruler, the image explaining how each centimetre of horizontal spine cost a dollar. Sally Rooney, say, would be a steal compared to Liane Moriarty. Cloudstreet was twice the price of Juice, Tim Winton’s more recent novel. It was insane, but simple. Poetry ran hot, while sagas were slow to move.
Muggeseggele: #unitchat examines the offbeat ways we measure things.Credit: Getty Images
I shared a photo of the sign on Bluesky. Fittingly, it went big. The image was roped into a hashtag called #unitchat, a realm haunted by numerical types such as Professor Amie Albrecht, who lectures in maths education at the University of South Australia. Unit chat examines the offbeat ways we measure things, from a jiffy to a flash, a stone’s throw to a country mile. Half a nose in racing parlance is 10 times a bee’s dick.
In Albania, I’m told, a walk’s distance is gauged in cigars. Not end-to-end, but the time it takes to smoke one, or seven, depending on how far you go. Weary of guesswork, Sir Francis Beaufort devised the wind scale sailors still honour, where zero is the doldrums and 12 will flatten your mast. Three sheets to the wind, for that matter, applies to the drinker of umpteen fingers of whisky, while a dollop is nearer a tablespoon than a teaspoon’s skerrick.
Adam Sharp, author of The Correct Order of Biscuits And Other Meticulously Assembled Lists of Extremely Valuable Nonsense (Trapeze, 2020) is a bowerbird of exotic phrases, many capturing measurement. In Swabian German, say, a muggeseggele is a smidge, literally a housefly’s scrotum. In Japanese, a tiny flat equates to a cat’s forehead, while a short Dutch child is compared to three lumps of peat – our knee-high to a grasshopper.
The calculus of political time is another rich vein. A week, we know, is a long time in politics, just as we learnt a lettuce can outlast an embattled PM, the 49-day reign of Liz Truss falling short of the Daily Star’s famous iceberg. Closer to home, a Meninga is a fraction of a Scaramucci, thanks to NRL star Mal going only a day as the independent candidate for Molonglo in contrast to lawyer Anthony Scaramucci surviving 10 days as White House comms director in 2007.
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Meanwhile, liquid can be meted in Olympic pools or Sydney Harbours, alias a Sydharb – some 530,000 megalitres. Freeze the water into hail and we summon golf versus cricket balls. Or lawn bowls, in the case of Dr Joshua Soderholm’s hailstone library, the Queensland thunderstorm scientist using 3D-printing to create his archive, including a South Dakota kahuna some 20 centimetres in diameter, an approximate rockmelon.
Dr Dave Watson, an ecology professor at Charles Sturt Uni, applies snacks to convey native animal sizes, where “the mulgara equates to a burrito, pardalotes are the size of a dim sim, and you’d need at least three fairy wrens to fill a taco.” As for those Hobart books, I splashed out on The Overstory by Richard Powers, a four-centimetre house-brick dealing with redwoods the height of 30-storey buildings. In terms of review hype, it measured up.
