Historic shoes sizes are measured in barleycorns. This is one third of an inch. But a barleycorn... the grain isn't a third of an inch long. It's just what they called the thing they used for shoe sizes because the fundamental rule of clothing sizes is that they must never ever make ANY sense at all. Not even a little.

Why is your grain so pawky?

@futurebird

@adriano

When I first heard about barleycorns I thought the person was making it up to make fun of imperial measurements.

What's next? Doormice? Cat whiskers?

@mhoye @futurebird fun fact, it's the same unit. A 12 point font is half a barleycorn in size.

Historic shoes sizes are measured in barleycorns. This is one third of an inch. But a barleycorn... the grain isn't a third of an inch long. It's just what they called the thing they used for shoe sizes because the fundamental rule of clothing sizes is that they must never ever make ANY sense at all. Not even a little.

@futurebird I always like this diagram for explaining these old measurements. And also wondered if the foot ailment of having 'corns' was caused by shoes a barleycorn too small

@Paperposts

Who is Ramsden? WHO is GUNTER?

@futurebird I always like this diagram for explaining these old measurements. And also wondered if the foot ailment of having 'corns' was caused by shoes a barleycorn too small

@futurebird I always like this diagram for explaining these old measurements. And also wondered if the foot ailment of having 'corns' was caused by shoes a barleycorn too small

@Paperposts

If LLMs and AI images didn't exist I'd edit this to add ant themed units and post it about to cause trouble... but ... I don't find that as amusing as I once did.

@Paperposts @futurebird

USAnians and some (mostly older) UKians: that unholy mess covering 90% of the chart

Everyone else: that nice clean single vertical line with a bunch of evenly spaced units ending in “m”

@dpnash @futurebird i’m just glad it doesn’t include paper sizes or barrels too

@futurebird I always like this diagram for explaining these old measurements. And also wondered if the foot ailment of having 'corns' was caused by shoes a barleycorn too small

@mhoye @futurebird fun fact, it's the same unit. A 12 point font is half a barleycorn in size.

@sophieschmieg @mhoye @futurebird There was clearly a good reason to have 12 points be a length unit unto itself, much like 12 inches is 1 foot. But back in the day, there was a schism between the people who wanted to call the 12-point unit a "barle" (the normies) or an "ycorn" (the weirdos who -- not entirely unreasonably -- thought "yttrium" was the coolest thing to name an element, ever). As a result (and also because nobody could agree on a pronunciation for either one), no special name for this otherwise useful length entered the lexicon.

(/s, in case it's not clear)

@dpnash @mhoye @futurebird you jest, but: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barleycorn_(unit)

@dpnash @mhoye @futurebird the random factor of 11 you pick up somewhere on your way to miles still haunts me.

@sophieschmieg @mhoye @futurebird It's an artifact of when some silly English git decided that the mile, which the Romans pegged at a sort-of-sensible "thousand paces" at 5 feet per "pace", needed to be an exact integer number of furlongs.

What is a fscking furlong? An originally not-too-terrible agricultural unit, representing a more-or-less typical length of plowed field. Unfortunately, the official "furlong" was 220 yards or 660 feet, which is not only why there is a cursed factor of 11 in things, it's why the English (and hence US) mile is 5280 feet (=8x660) instead of 5000.

It gets worse, and I'm not going to go into it here (the attached Wikipedia article covers it better), but the furlong itself was once more "even" (600 feet), and it *also* got contorted into something more awkward because of an underlying unit re-definition.

Furlong - Wikipedia

(en.wikipedia.org)