Have you ever felt half-full, half-hungry? Some folks for whom hunger is a more binary switch might not relate to that, but then perhaps they can think of something else, like how much you groan when you see that the elevator’s out or how different things can make you differently happy.
From there, it’s not that far of a step to also want to talk of three-fourths hungry or to, over time and with some self-awareness and reflection (or I guess it could just as likely be just wrong-headed, hubristic misguessing) remember and rank all kinds of moods and experiences with some more granularity and express them on a scale of one to a hundred.
Many years ago someone commented that they never knew where people like me got our percentages from. When I say things “I’m 90% sure that…” they’re like whuh how could you even measure that and I didn’t have a good answer for them. I felt caught, I realized that I had only been pulling the numbers out of my hat and I felt like a phony. The topic weren’t the kinds of things where you actually do have percentages like if you poll a bunch of people and do statistics to see what percentage of people eat plants or whatever, the topic was something along the line of “I’m 75% sure”. Of discussing credence in relative terms rather than absolute terms. Their comment only left me speechless for a moment and the next day my mouth was as full of percent signs and scales as it ever was (I feel that people who tell me I’ve got “black-and-white thinking” don’t really know me at all). But only today I figured out a way to actually answer their question; to my own satisfaction at least. I don’t know about them because I don’t remember who it was that said that. Someone on IRC, I think. But it’s like saying you’re half-hungry, except taken to a ridiculous level. That’s my answer.