Subjective Units in measurement have long been used in the field, but in the lay community, these units are often misused or misunderstood. I would like to present here a list of the most commonly used S.U.’s, their proper definition, and usage.
Many people mistakenly believe that S.U.’s cannot be precisely defined or standardized, but this is not the case. The concept of the Least Noticeable Difference, frequently used in psychology and the study of perception, is the canonical case of a standard Subjective Unit. Subjective Units contain, at their core, a subjective perception of the thing being measured. Please do not mistake these for relative units, which are an entirely different class of object.
scad
The scad is one of the more obscure units, but commonly used by wildlife biologists in the field:
Q: How many mosquitos were present?
A: Scads!
The scad is a logarithmic unit, and is defined as 2 to the power of the number of objects one can easily count (or guesstimate) at a glance. For instance, you might be able to count a grouping of about 5 cats at a glance, with reasonable margins of error (give or take half a cat). If you were to be confronted by 1 scad of cats, the number of cats present would be about 32. Because of its logarithmic scale, this unit is typically used singularly or in a generalize multiple, scads. For most practical purposes, “scads” indicates more than enough objects to make the actual number irrelevant for most calculations.
Factoid: The scad was originally developed by Ernst Mach, while attempting to address the number of stars extant in the universe so that a numerical formulation of Mach’s Principle might be presented.
shitload, pissload
One of the most commonly used (and abused) units among non-scientists. The shitload is a unit of mass, though like the kilogram, it is often misconstrued as a unit of weight. While a shitload always weighs the same in the earth’s gravitational field, on the moon it would weigh one sixth as much. It is also often confabulated with a related unit, the pissload, a volumetric unit. One pissload of standard-density shit would mass one shitload. The pissload is almost entirely unused outside the lab, and shitload is often used incorrectly as an equivalent. Shitload is also often misused as a number scale, where scad would be more appropriate.
The shitload is an SI unit, and is equivalent to 10 times the amount of shit (or any unpleasant substance) one is prepared to deal with at a particular time. Therefore, one decishitload is exactly the mass of shit you are prepared to deal with at the moment. The phrase “metric shitload” is redundant, shitload is already a decimalized SI unit.
load
Most people assume that the load is the base unit of the shitload, but this is a strange case of convergent nomenclature, where the same word has developed within entirely different disciplines. The load is a volumetric measure, and indicates the volume of material one would be willing to dig from a pit in order to get to a gold nugget exactly 48.2 grams in weight. This rather unwieldy definition illuminates this unit’s origin in early metallurgy, and in fact may have originated among alchemists in the 14th century. The formal definition was written by Henry Frank of San Monteo mining company in 1893.
It is considered incorrect to use load with other S.U.’s. Fuckload, noseload (rare) and pantload are all multiples of the shitload, not the load.
gob
A less frequently used unit, but very important, the gob is a unit that applies only to amorphous, blobular masses. It is essentially a volumetric measurement, but it would be incorrect to apply it to liquids or solids. Saying “a gob of water” would be nonsensical.
The gob is not an SI unit, it is believed to have arisen as a measure of how much chewing tobacco one should attempt to chew at one time. The gob is defined as the volume of sticky, amorphous or blobular material that can be held in the mouth without either choking, or losing any of the material from between the lips.
more than you can shake a stick at, stick
Technically not a unit itself, but this common phrase from sociology is based on the stick, which is the number of items one could encompass in an area swept out from the shoulder to the horizon (with or without a stick in hand), by holding ones arm horizontal to the ground, and rotating it in the horizontal plane through the maximal number of degrees one can comfortably sweep without raising either foot from the ground. When sociologists or biologists say “more than you can shake a stick at” they are referring to any number greater than one stick.
fuck
Perhaps the most commonly used S.U., the fuck is an amount indicating that number/volume/mass/temperature/etc necessary to cause fucking. Standardized in 1872 by Jacques Perier in Paris, this became widely used in finance and surveying, but almost never occurred in scholarly papers due to the etiquette of the day. Now most commonly used in combination with other units: fuckload = 1 fuck of shitloads, or the mass of unpleasant material require to force or inspire fucking. This is a popular measure, despite its somewhat awkward conceptual form.
Another common usage is to modify temperature: hot as fuck, fucking cold, etc. Fucking cold is the temperature at which you are willing to fuck whoever happens to be next to you to keep warm.
Factoid: The fuck as a scientific measurement was popularized in the US by Richard Nixon in a series of public speeches in 1970-71, though several years passed before it was realized that this was an effort at scientific accuracy in public policy, and not a drunken tirade about Russian nuclear arms.
Fuck can be used to modify any measurement, even non-subjective SI units such as the meter or gram.
hell
Common forms: hot as hell, cold as hell, hella fast, hellacious.
Like fuck, hell is a generalized scale whose unit refers to an amount necessary to approach hell-like conditions (defined by Pope Anxious II as appearing infinite in all characteristics, but not actually infinite in any characteristic). The hell is properly used in situations where one cannot comfortably conceive of any greater amount, temperature, size, etc, without resorting to infinities. For instance, to describe a woman as hella cute, implies that anyone cuter would have to be, in essence, infinitely cute.
The hell is unique in having no plural forms - anything greater than 1 on the hell scale is infinite.
There are many other subjective units in use today, perhaps I will complete my list at some point in the future, but for now I hope I have cleared up some confusion and brought some technical accuracy to your usage of subjective units.
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