A recent sunset. Still pre-leaf.

Not long ago I overheard two young women ahead of me in line. A bit of their talk went like this, more or less.

The One: Don’t end up being the stupid girl with the stupid tattoo.

The Other: Only one friend of mine has a tattoo, Sonya, and she’s the stupidest person I know.

One: Why are you friends with her?

Other: Well, our great-grandparents were in a displaced persons camp together, and our families have been friends ever since.

The other day I wondered what dogs would come up with as their traditional measuring system. Or at least some dogs — say, the dogs of the British Isles, which they later took to many parts of the world. Provided, of course, dogs could do that kind of abstract reasoning. Assume they can for a moment.

Let’s stick with units of length. The paw would be the basic unit. Four paws to a snout, eight paws to a tail (four is important to dogs; in fact, they use Base 4 for counting). A dog mile — I don’t have a word for that yet — would be 800 tails. What would these be in human measurement? I don’t feel the need to work that out just now.

In modern usage, the snout’s mostly obsolete. And the rest of the traditional measurements are in danger of disappearing. During the revolution, Jacobin dogs in France came up with lengths supposedly based on 1/4,000,000 of the distance from the equator to the North Pole, but I’ll leave that for another time.