The Cubit from 'Ell: and the ways of weights and the maze of measures

Abandon hype, all ye who enter here!
All ye, that is, who might have thought that humanity’s need for comparison and meaningful expression might be dull, dry and deadly boring. Well, it ain’t, and we humans have been coming up with new weights and measures since old Methuselah’s great grandad was a young lad, and we haven’t stopped yet.
The challenge has been just what to call the things so that each of us could intuitively understand what the other was talking about and avoid an argument, let alone the loss of fingers, noses, eyeballs and other desirable anatomical attributes to the forces of regal retribution following some felonious fiddling on the part of some miscreant merchants.
The Cubit from ‘Ell throws away the textbook and tables of weights and measures and delves into the practical problem solving depths of the human mind to glean and gather glimpses of our ancestors’ lives and thoughts to appreciate why such particular comparative devices were necessary and just how they came to be named the way they were, and are.
In the end, we’re not all that different and, though separated widely by time, distance and culture, have often found the same solution to the same problem in the same way. Some of these ways have been extraordinarily practical; some have been downright hilarious; all have been highly human and worthy of celebrating just for that.