Measuring yourself with a tape
Measuring yourself with a tape was unlucky in several old traditions, partly because undertakers measured the dead that way. Families still mark children's heights on door frames, though only one kind of growth ever gets a pencil line.
What it may mean
In many homes there is a door frame covered in pencil lines, each with a name and a date, rising year by year as the children grow. It is one of the loveliest records a family keeps, and it measures only one kind of growth. Nobody draws a line for the year a child learned to apologize, or the year a parent finally learned to rest. Old beliefs about measuring were wary for other reasons: in Madagascar, measuring your own height was said to stop your growth, and in Cuba and the West Indies a measuring rule once used on the dead was not to be laid against the living. Today's tape measures are harmless, but they still catch only what can be counted. The rest of the growing goes on unmarked.
Depending on how you saw it
Measuring a child against the door frame
Pencil marks on a door frame often survive several coats of paint, and families who move sometimes photograph them or cut out the board. The marks matter more than the inches. Which record of your family would you most want to take with you?
A tape around your waist
An old list of superstitions warned that measuring your waist, as if for a dress, was unlucky. Others dread the tape for simpler reasons. How much of your mood on a given day rests on one number?
Being measured by a tailor
A tailor measures quickly and without comment, turning numbers into a garment that fits. Being measured by someone whose job is to help feels different from measuring yourself. Whose honest measure of you has helped you most?
Measuring back to back
Children and couples love to stand back to back to see who is taller, and an old entry even warned against doing it on a Sunday. The game ends in laughter either way. Who do you still compare yourself with, half in fun?
Why it happens in nature
People are slightly taller in the morning than at night, because the discs in the spine compress a little during the day, and waist measurements shift with meals, posture and breathing. Undertakers once measured the dead with rods or tapes to make coffins, which is how measuring picked up its grim associations.
What folk beliefs say
Madagascar
In Madagascar, a 1903 collection says, measuring your own height was believed to stop your growth.
Source: Cora Linn Daniels; C. M. Stevans (eds.), Encyclopaedia of Superstitions, Folklore, and the Occult Sciences of the World, vol. 1 (1903), vol. 1, p. 207. View the page
Cuba
Cubans thought that if you happened to measure yourself with a rule used to measure the dead, you would die within a year.
Source: Cora Linn Daniels; C. M. Stevans (eds.), Encyclopaedia of Superstitions, Folklore, and the Occult Sciences of the World, vol. 1 (1903), vol. 1, p. 156. View the page
West Indies
In the West Indies, taking a cane that had been used to measure a coffin and measuring yourself with it was an omen of death.
Source: Cora Linn Daniels; C. M. Stevans (eds.), Encyclopaedia of Superstitions, Folklore, and the Occult Sciences of the World, vol. 1 (1903), vol. 1, pp. 207-208. View the page
Ancient Greece
The ancient Greeks, the same collection says, believed that measuring the height and girth of an enemy's body would make him pine away and die.
Source: Cora Linn Daniels; C. M. Stevans (eds.), Encyclopaedia of Superstitions, Folklore, and the Occult Sciences of the World, vol. 1 (1903), vol. 1, p. 207. View the page
To reflect on
Which kind of growth in your life has never been marked on any door frame?