CHAT: Con-English chat: 50 Watsons (was: RE: [CONLANG] Some more Madzhi grammar

John Cowan:
> In Lojban a dog certainly does dog, not in the English sense of 'to dog',
> of course.
>
> "He dogs my footsteps with the incompetent zeal of fifty Watsons."
>         --Lord Peter Wimsey
Observing standard Poccessorial criteria for relevance of comment, I
remark that if one can manage to misread that sentence as "He dogs my
footsteps with an incompetent zeal of fifty Watsons", we get a
rather pleasing reading whereby a Watson is a unit for the measurement
of degrees of incompetent zeal.

This reminds me of a footnote in Pollard & Sag's 1994 _Head-driven
Phrase Structure Grammar_ in which they (giving due credit to their
source) define a _millihelen_ as that unit of beauty sufficient to
launch one ship.

Feel free to cite other cute units of measurement, and I'll compile
a list.

--And.

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