Lies, damn lies and Irish statistics
In the film Mary Poppins, our heroine has a tape measure in her enormously capacious bag, which she uses to measure her charges, the children of the Banks family. She employs it in the usual way but instead of reporting their height it reports their character. The scene culminates with the children measuring her and finding her “practically perfect in every way”. However, for the rest of us, a tape measure wouldn’t be a sensible way to measure someone’s character.