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

And Rosta wrote:
>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.
>
The beard-second; length increase of a normal hair in normal beard in normal
face during one second; 10^-8 m. Don't know the original source; it's given
in a footnote in my Physics Handbook, with the remark that it's chances to
become established in physics seems rather slim.

                                                       Andreas

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