Warning: this sociology paper by Mike Michael is a rabbit hole, leading to other rabbit holes - fascinating, occasionally hilarious & sometimes downright bizarre...
It's about what the author calls "lay metrology".
That's describing measurements in terms that are presumed to give lay people a sense of the proportion - like saying something's "twice the size of Wales"....
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https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/09636625231186782
...First I checked out the Wikipedia page to find out what metrology was: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metrology
In which I learned the first known standardized measure was the royal Egyptian cubit - the length of the Pharaoh's arm plus width of his hand. Standardizing managed to get the pyramids bang on....
Measuring by the body isn't unusual. There's the Smoot. From Michael's paper:
"The Smoot is the unit of length of 5 feet 7 inches equivalent to the height in 1958 of then student Oliver R. Smoot...
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..."...who was used to measure the span of the Harvard Bridge (364.4 Smoots). Ironically, Smoots subsequently became the American National Standards Institute’s Chairman, and then the International Organisation for Standardisation’s (ISO) president. The Smoot, among other units, is (ironically) used by both Google Earth and Google Calculator."
The Smoot features in the Wikipedia List of humorous units of measurement, which Michael references:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_humorous_units_of_measurement
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Hilda Bastian
Andrés E. Caicedo