yardstick

“We had our whippings. It was the yardstick,” said Stewart’s brother, Frank Kostyra.

“We dreaded the yardstick. And at times, it was the end of the belt.”

It’s simplistic just to look at Leach’s seven wickets against Bashir’s one as the yardstick of success – the devil is in the detail.

Walking on the sandy riverbed, McNeish used a yardstick to estimate how much the water had receded in an isolated pond since her last visit.

At another point, McNeish stopped at a dry depression and poked her yardstick into tangled aquatic plants, finding dead tadpoles.