The Power of Words

By David L. Brown

I have always found it strange how the popular press so often refuses to use actual units of measurement when describing the size of things. We are often told of objects that are “as big as a football field,” and the search for even more creative units of measurement appears to be endless.

It even shows up in popular science reporting. I recently read a news item about a spacecraft that is photographing the surface of Mars. The report said that at present the camera is able to see objects “as small as a bus,” but that when the craft settles down into its final orbit closer to the planet, it will be able to image things “as small as a microwave oven.”

Now I don’t expect there are very many buses on Mars (no gas stations!), although I admit the possibility that there may be a few microwave ovens lying around (one must always keep an open mind). But all that aside, why do you think journalists refer to these bizarre objects rather than saying something like “12 meters” instead of “bus” or “50 centimeters” instead of “microwave oven”? Well, obviously because they believe (and with good reason) that many if not most American readers would have no idea what they were talking about.

But since that is the case, why not say “40 feet” or “20 inches” instead of rolling out a bus or firing up a microwave oven? Surely astute readers could visualize objects on those scales, couldn’t they?

The original and most widely over-used unit of measure in modern journalism is probably the “football field,” which it turns out is exactly the size of a surprising number of objects (or at least close enough for journalism work). For example, when the new Airbus A380 super jumbo jet landed for the first time in New York I was not surprised to see the 239-foot long craft described as “football field sized.” See, close enough.

Sometimes things are the size of “two football fields,” or I have even seen references to something the size of “six football fields.” After that it seems to break down as a useful unit of measure, although it is difficult to know why because standard units can be used in any quantity. The size of the Universe could be stated in terms of football fields, buses, or even microwave ovens, so why limit the use of these handy units of measurement to only modest-sized objects?

And it doesn’t stop there. I have seen things compared in size to phone booths, pianos, automobiles, and so forth. Unlike the standard football field, which measures 300 feet long, none of these are particularly precise. For example:

• Is the phone booth one of those big ones that could hold a crowd of college boys … or the kind that sticks up on a post and only surrounds the head and shoulders of the user?

• Is the piano a compact spinet … or a 1255 pound, 9-foot six-inch Bosendorfer Model 290 Concert Grand?

• Is the car a Mini Cooper … or a Lincoln Stretch Limo with full police escort?

Precision is a basic quality that one should look for in units of measurement, so all of these examples fall short on that important count. If one were going to express the size of the universe in phone booths, pianos, or automobiles it would leave quite a lot of uncertainty for cosmologists, who might conclude that the Big Bang was merely a car backfiring or an intergalactic phone that had been left off the hook.

Humankind has spent millennia refining the measurement of distance, volume, and weight. In early times units were established by such expedients as measuring the length of the king’s foot (which oddly enough yielded the unit called the “foot”), or the average first finger joint (the inch).

Over time more accurate units of measurement were developed and standardized, culminating in the metric system. A universal system of measurements was a basic requirement for the development of technology and science, because neatness does count. The English system (inches, feet, yards) is still commonly used in America-we are the only industrialized nation to do so-although our scientists, engineers and manufacturers use metric units to stay in tune with the rest of the world.

Well, usually they do although some of you may remember the fate of the Mars Polar Lander that crashed because engineers mixed up metric and English units of measurement. I’m sure those responsible will never hear the end of that no matter how long they live.

There is a good reason why the metric system is superior, namely because its units are all to a base-10 just as our mathematical conventions are. That makes it easy to perform calculations that involve units of measurement. As any sixth grader knows, it is not so easy to do math problems where there are 12 inches to a foot and three feet to a yard. In the metric system you go from each succeeding level merely by moving a decimal point one place. Simple, right? And yet for everyday purposes most Americans still hold to the old inch-foot-yard system that has its roots in pre-scientific times when monarchs were holding out their royal feet to be measured.

One can only hope that in a few times as long as a basketball season there will be a return to rational and accurate reporting of measurements. I do not recommend holding your breath, not even for as long as it takes a football to fly over the bar for an extra point. Come to think of it perhaps the discovery of microwave ovens on Mars will occur sooner.

© 2009 by David L. Brown, Inc. All Rights Reserved.