Unusual Measurements of Quantity and Distance

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hello, this is Joseph Torsivia from Houma, Louisiana.

Hi, Joseph. Welcome to the show.

Hi, Joseph.

Hi there. Thank you. Hello, Grant Martha. How are you?

All right. What’s up?

So I have an interesting story, and I didn’t know if there’s some other local dialect type of distances that folks would use.

But I am in the Coast Guard, and I was stationed in Morgan City, Louisiana.

And I was going out to an oil spill out in the Chafalaya Basin, so real deep in Cajun country.

And when we showed up at the boat launch, we didn’t know how to get out to where the oil spill was.

And a local craw fisherman gave us a unit of measurement that I’d never heard before.

He told us to go down the bayou about four eye sights.

And when we finally got him to explain what that was, it was as far as you could see, and that was one turn of the bayou.

And then that was one, and then you’d go to the second, and so on and so forth.

Oh, wow.

Once he explains it, it makes sense, right?

It does, especially for somewhere down there where it’s real windy and there’s not a lot of landmarks.

And that was 2011, so GPS was still not really a thing quite yet.

Yeah, it was a pretty cool term.

So he was actually using this seriously, right? Not just as a joke or something.

No, absolutely.

We were there in official capacity, and he was giving us the best directions he could tell us.

How nice is that?

Just nice to hear those terms in the wild, Martha.

Yeah, that’s wonderful.

And Joseph, it reminds me of a call that we had, gosh, years and years ago, maybe eight or nine years ago, from a guy named Brian who was running across the United States.

He would go off and run across, you know, Vermont or go off and run across Utah.

And he called us to say that when he was in West Virginia, he was asking directions.

And one of the people there said, well, to get to where you’re wanting to go here, you want to go six Farsis away.

And he thought, Farsis? What are there? Farsi speakers here?

But then he realized that the guy was saying, go as far as you can see, and then go as far as you can see from there, and do that a total of six times, six Farsi’s.

And that’s always stuck with me.

I’ve seen it mentioned a couple of other times once in relation to West Virginia, and somebody else in upstate New York used that term, Farsi.

So it sounds like the same thing, really, an eyesight or a Farsi, as far as you can see.

It absolutely does.

It’s interesting how the terminology has changed a little bit, but it’s still that same measurement of distance.

Yeah, I don’t know if it’s changed or just coexisted, but Grant, we have lots of approximate measures of distance like that.

Well, I have a third one to toss in here.

This is from a book, and they’re talking about something they heard among the Pennsylvania Dutch.

And in answer to a question about a route to take, they heard back, go two far sights, turn right, one go down, cross to a tree, and a right smart piece beyond.

Those were the directions.

But a far sight is the same as an eyesight or a far sea.

So that’s three different ways to say the same thing.

So we’ve got a pattern here.

That is pretty neat.

We sure do.

I’m wondering if GPSs are going to start doing that.

In 400 meters, turn right and go one Farsi.

But I would really love to hear if there are other people around the country or around the world who have similar expressions like that.

Give us a call, 877-929-9673.

We’d love to hear your unconventional measurements of distance.

Joseph, this was an enlightening call, and we would love to hear anything else like this that you run across in your work for the Coast Guard.

Absolutely. I’ll be sure to send it along.

Okay. Thank you for calling, and take care out there, all right?

Thank you. You as well. You guys have a great day.

All right. Be well.

You too, Joseph. Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

Martha, you mentioned other kinds of measurements, and besides distance, we have things like talking about water or mud that is shoe-mouth deep.

Shoe-mouth.

Is that where your shoe ends and your ankle starts?

Yeah, well, the mouth of your shoe, where your ankle goes in.

Or water that is straddled deep that’s kind of up to your crotch.

Or among loggers, supposedly at one time, they’d talk about things being an axe handle length.

And one definition is it’s a unit of length shorter than a hoop and a hauler.

Axe handle length.

It’s interesting how many times we use parts of the body to measure things.

Like I’m thinking about the word fathom, which was originally the distance of a man’s outstretched arms.

That’s why we have the expression, I can’t fathom that.

I can’t get my arms around it.

But a fathom was usually about six feet.

And then there’s also the double fist, an amount equal to the size of putting your two fists together.

You might have, in mining, a double fist-sized piece of coal is known as a cobble, which is interesting.

There you go.

And then galpin, you know, the term that means the amount that you can hold in two hands.

Galpin or yespin.

We could go on all day about this.

Well, we have an hour.

We’d love to hear your unconventional measurements.

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