A stone's throw is described as approximately 20 to 25 feet.
Does it make sense to describe double that distance as "two stones throws away" or would I have to use some other unit?
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If you wanted to pluralise “a stone’s throw away”, then you could use “stones’ throws away”. That is, if you were to throw a stone, walk to where it landed, then throw it again, you would have made two throws of stones, or two stones’ throws. By similar logic, you could also use “two stone-throws”, where one stone-throw is the distance covered by one throw of one stone. It’s important to note that you can only do this for comedic or rhetorical effect. The original phrase is an idiom meaning nearby, so pluralising it makes exactly as little literal sense as pluralising nearby. |
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I think the answerer to the post you mention is just being slightly flippant. When somebody says that something is a "stone's throw away", they just mean that it's comparatively "very near". They don't have a particular number of feet in mind-- and indeed, if I say "the pub is a stone's throw from Jim's house" or "Preston is a stone's throw from Manchester", chances are that although it's comparatively "nearby", it's still further than you could actually throw a stone. You could conceivably say e.g. "It's several stones' throw away", but I think without context the meaning would be more ambiguous (i.e. do you mean it's "just a bit further than very nearby" or do you mean it's "quite far away"?). |
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That wording would be folksy and appropriate in a certain kind of writing, but surely no one would read it to mean 40-50 feet away. So if it is important that someone reads it as being a particular length, you would need to find some new turn of phrase. |
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It's a prepositional phrase acting as an adjective (an adjectival phrase) meaning "quite near", and we don't pluralize adjectives in English. So, use different or more precise phraseology, or just stretch the meaning, e.g. "The moon is just a stone's throw from the Earth, compared to Mars." |
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