Because saying "A square 14m x 14m" is too confusing somehow... I hate when they do it for huge surfaces though, like for forest fires as people don't comprehend big numbers like "100 000 football fields", but they sure can understand that 100km is a long distance so a 100km x 100km square is fucking huge.
Makes sense. I'll never know how big 'a football field' is as I've never seen one. I assume it's just under half a hectare (which is 1 hectometer on a side).
Including end zones, an American football field is precisely 360 feet long and 160 feet wide, or approximately 110m x 50m. The area is 1.32 acres.
It's precisely defined so I'm okay with it being used as an area of length or area, especially since virtually all Americans have personal experience with football fields, having at the very least been required to run four laps of the quarter-mile track you usually find wrapped around one.
Can we please standardize handling of dashes in multi-word adverb-adjective phrases?
Option 1: North American-sized (most common)
Option 2: North-American sized (as seen in the article)
Option 3: North-American-sized (makes most sense to me)
Option 4: North American sized (Edit: added based on @robocall@lemmy.world's comment)
The regulation appears to be based on the area of the plot, not the dimensions. By assigning explicitly annotated dimensions it can confuse the intended message more than using a goofy but useful analogy.