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"The lightning flashed incessantly and the flashes lasted *while one might count five*." #CrimeAndPunishment Part 6, Chapter 6 (trans. Jessie Coulson)
That expression - while one might count five - stopped me for a second. Almost identical in the Garnett translation:
"There were flashes of lightning every minute and each flash lasted while one could count five."
I am sure I have encountered the phrase before but it made me wonder: why not just say "it lasted five seconds" or "it lasted almost five seconds" -- are there certain instances where this sort of phrase is more likely than reference to a unit of time?
And fun that I immediately registered it as a contemporary act as well (one Mississippi, two Mississippi), and one of the first hits for me in Google Books involved keeping musical time.
For (wholly imprecise) fun, sharing a google #NGram chart screenshot, full version here: https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=while+one+might+count%2Cwhile+one+could+count&year_start=1800&year_end=2019&corpus=en-2019&smoothing=3
