Furthermore, even if I had vowed silence your reference to "...they take an ell." intrigued me so much I just couldn't keep silent.
Do you care to enlighten me?
You know how to play a Dominican! How can I decline to share knowledge, even if it’s trivial?
I suppose a ‘yard’ is a reference to some kind of measuring stick as ‘beam’ (you know, that thing in my eye) is among the many meanings of that VERY interesting word. (’Y’s are interesting — I used not to understand how much they are until I heard my learning-to-speak daughter pronounce ‘yeast’ a ‘gheest’ - and so I saw how something we do with the front middle of our tongue could be related to glottal consonants as well as to the labial ‘w’.)
An ell is a unit of measure, (related to el-bow - where ‘el’ appears to mean arm, so the ‘bow’ is where it bends) about a yard in length. Having a limey mother who reared me on English books, I first heard “give an inch and he’ll take a yard,” as “give an inch and he’ll take an ‘ell’.” So, about an arm’s length, indeed a yard.
One can imagine that after watching a small person and a large person measuring, say, yarn in arm’s lengths, somebody said “We need a standard. I know let’s get this ‘yard’ here, it’s about an arm’s length, and use that!”
In my senility, exacerbated as it is by side effects to the poisons the doctors ask me to take, I slip into the language of my childhood.