Transcript of “Preesh! A Way of Saying Thanks”
You’re listening to A Way with Words, the show about language and how we use it. I’m Grant Barrett.
And I’m Martha Barnette. A few weeks ago, we talked about that German term for a short distance, Katzensprung. Do you remember that, Grant? Oh, yeah. Yeah, like a cat’s leap or a cat’s spring.
It’s sort of the equivalent of a stone’s throw. You know, it’s not a very long distance. But there are lots of other approximate distances like that that are very picturesque. For example, in Greece today, if something’s nearby, you might say that it’s one cigarette away in a cigarro dromos, which is the distance that you can walk while finishing a cigarette.
And in Australia, if something’s far away, either literally or metaphorically, you might say it’s not within a bull’s roar. And that’s because a bellowing bull can be heard for a long, long way. I know you’ve talked about this before, Grant. In Boston, you might hear people joking about a unit of measurement called a Smoot, which is five feet, seven inches.
And that stems from a prank at MIT in 1958, where fraternity members used one of their pledges named Oliver Smoot Jr. as a unit of measure to determine the length of the bridge that connects Boston to MIT’s campus in Cambridge. And Smoot does appear in the American Heritage Dictionary. It says, interestingly, Smoot went on to become the chair of the American National Standards Institute and the president of the International Organization for Standardization.
That’s outstanding. How perfect is that? Isn’t that great? Smoot. Plus a fun name to say. Yes. It reminds me of all the teasing on Reddit that the Americans get from the rest of the world, basically, of how we’ll measure anything by anything else, as long as we don’t have to use the metric system.
We’ll say it’s as big as a baseball field or as big as a football field or one Empire State Building tall or it’s two car lengths or something like that, but we won’t say like 10 meters. We should avoid it. If we can avoid using the metric, we will.
Why haven’t we switched to metric yet?
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