[Carruthers]

Originally Posted by xoxoxoBruce

Authors have always used commonly know items to relate the size of something...

Wales, London buses and Wembley Stadium are all commonly used by UK media to illustrate size, area, distance etc.
Add in the Isle of Wight and Olympic size swimming pools and you don't really need much else.

Wales, Belgium and other units of measurement

Jeremy Clarkson was quite right when he dismissed 'the size of Luxembourg' as a meaningless comparison

A double-decker bus - equal to roughly one third of the length of an Olympic-sized swimming pool.

Jeremy Clarkson had a point – and that's not something you hear me say every day (indeed, any day) – when in a recent Sun column he challenged the scientists (or "eco-ists" as Jezza termed them) who had described a slab of ice that had broken away from Antarctica as "the size of Luxembourg".

"I'm sorry but Luxembourg is meaningless," said Clarkson, pointing out that the standard units of measurement in the UK are double-decker London buses, football pitches and Wales. He could have added the Isle of Wight, Olympic-sized swimming pools and Wembley stadiums to the list.

A Guardian letter writer, commenting on the same story, endorsed the argument: "I would have had some difficulty even if the chunk had been described in terms of the size of Wales. Could you tell us how big it was in football pitches or Olympic swimming pools?"

As Nancy Banks-Smith has noted: "Any plague spot of indeterminate location is always compared to Wales. Wales is not quite sure how to take this."

The comparison crops up regularly – a dozen times in the Guardian and Observer in the last year; more than 70 in other national papers. It is most popular with travel writers, who helpfully inform us, for example, that a particular mangrove swamp in India – reached incidentally by an "iconic bridge" – is "half the size of Wales" (Independent), whereas Botswana is "twice the size of Wales" (Sunday Telegraph).

Perhaps, as with metric and imperial measurements, such comparisons should be given convenient abbreviations: SoWs (size of Wales), SoBs (size of Belgium), OSPs (Olympic swimming pools), DDBs (buses) and so on. Thus the Kruger national park in South Africa measures 1 SoW (Daily Telegraph), as do Lesotho (London Evening Standard) and Israel (Times), whereas Lake Nzerakera in Tanzania is 2 SoBs (Observer).

We would need a currency converter to establish how many OSPs would be filled by the Deepwater oil spill, but I can confirm that the slick is half an SoW (Times).

In G2 last month we revealed: "All the gold that has ever been mined would make a cube [equivalent to] a stack of Routemaster buses four deep, four high and four long" – under my system, that would be rendered much more handily as 4x4x4 DDBs. A Guardian report in March headlined "Isle of Wight-sized asteroid killed dinosaurs, scientists say" led to the following calculation from a reader: "So 1bn Hiroshimas = 1 (Isle of Wight) x 20 (speeding bullets)." He added: "Who needs E=mc2?"

At times the most carefully calibrated calculations can go awry. So we learn that Helmand province in Afghanistan is "four times the size of Wales" (Daily Telegraph, 2 December 2009) only to find a few weeks later that it has apparently shrunk to "the size of Wales" (Daily Telegraph, 29 January 2010).

You may think this is all an Olympic swimming pool-sized storm in a teacup. And it's true that – along with calculations of the "if all the hotdogs served at the Cup final were joined up they would reach Jupiter and back" variety – they are harmless, if meaningless and unhelpful, even for people such as me who have been to Wales (on a double-decker bus) and Belgium.

The style guide advises against using such lazy and cliched units of comparison. Maybe we need alternatives. I suggest "quite big", "big" and "very big".

But why, you may ask, are we never told what the size of Wales actually is? And, for that matter, the size of Belgium? For the record: the size of Wales is 20,779 sq km (8,022 sq miles). The size of Belgium is 30,528 sq km (11,787 sq miles).

To help you visualise it, that's one and a half times the size of Wales.

The Guardian

Posted from the Carruthers man cave which is 0.057 of a tennis court in area.
If you want the volume of the room as a percentage of that of a Routemaster bus, or anything else, I shall need notice.