Room Temp.

“Serve at room temperature . . . Keep at room temperature.” I never could figure out what “room temperature” is. When I leave my window open and the heat off in the winter, room temp is somewhere in the vicinity of 20 degrees or so. In the summer, it can easily hit in the high 90’s.

“Room Temp” is as variable as “Soup du Jour” in restaurants and diners everywhere. You ask the waiter what’s the Soup du Jour at ten different places, and you get ten different answers. Call a hundred diners to graph the Soup du Jour against the Room Temperature and I’m willing to bet you will not find any duplicates.

Football fields. Used, secondarily, for sporting events on weekends and as a place for endless time-outs so sponsors can squeeze in just two or three more commercials. Primarily, a unit of measure. As in, “This airplane is two football fields wide, wingtip to wingtip,” or “The asteroid which changed Cleveland from a city into the world’s biggest swimming hole was twenty-five football fields wide.”

Golf balls (for us) or coins (for them). A measure of hail. Us common folks, including those who talk to us from the television screen, talk about golf ball sized hail. Not a bad idea, when you think of it; if we see hail on the ground, or pick up a chunk, it looks a lot like –well- golf balls. Not at all like coins, which is how hail is measured by the people whose job it is to measure hail. “Dime-size . . . quarter-size . . . Sacagawea-dollar-size.” You’ll know it when it hits you.