“The thing you need to know about an oil tanker is that it’s really big. It’s about four soccer fields long”

Why do American writers do this

All this tells me is that oil tankers are really long

I know that oil tankers are long, and I kind of know what one football pitch looks like, but it’s kind of meaningless to say it’s four of them when all I know is “football pitches are long end to end”

“They weigh as much as a skyscraper”

HOW MUCH IS THAT!!! HOW MUCH DOES ONE WEIGH???? All that tells me is that an oil tanker is just really heavy, which is something I already know!!!

@yassie_j oil tanker is when football,

@yassie_j don't forget that they also carry several whales worth of oil!

@yassie_j that's a 437'th of the way to the sun!

@yassie_j sorry, what's that in washing machines? i don't play sports

@yassie_j big city wants you to believe skyscrapers are really heavy so that no one tries to steal one

@yassie_j the best part of this is that no one has an actual notion of how much a building weighs, so even the "intuitive measurement" angle fails lol

This happens in British English as well, but it’s either used for sensationalism, like when tabloids say “an iceberg the size of Wales!”, or it is used alongside the actual measurement, like “he can jump over ten metres, that’s like the length of a double-decker bus”

@yassie_j "Space is big. Really big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to space".

Douglas Adams, Restaurant At The End Of The Universe

@Primavera I have never ever needed to consider the weight of a building because all I know is “buildings are heavy and bigger buildings must be really heavy”

@yassie_j @Primavera the only time someone has to think about building weight is when either designing the foundation or when they're enough of a nerd that they think about it anyway

@yassie_j i also like comparisons like “A desert is as barren as the surface of the moon”. Where they explain deserts, something that quite a few of the readers can be expected to have personally experienced because one can just go there, by reference to a place that twelve people have ever been able to visit and most of them are already dead.

@yassie_j it weighs as much as texas

@anya @yassie_j also it undersells how barren the moon really is

@charlotte @yassie_j @anya and how not-barren deserts are

@charlotte @yassie_j @anya "a millionaire is as poor as that homeless guy under the bridge who just got all his worldly possessions stolen", as said by a clueless billionaire

@yassie_j A large oil tanker the size of a small oil tanker

@IngaLovinde @charlotte @yassie_j @anya in germany a multi-millionaire is "mittelschichticht" according to a guy who allegedly licks eggs

@CAETFOOD @yassie_j *takes a section of Earth, all the way to the core, and puts it on a scale*

Can confirm.