RegDwighт said: @Robusto wow, that's formatting to the max. Bold and italics and monospaced and in quotes. John has outlawlered himself.¹
It occurs to me that this is something we can measure.
I propose that a single character’s lawler weight (lw) be the standard unit of measure of the typographical emphasis applied to it (such as bold face, larger font, italics, quotation marks, and block quoting). If a character has no typographical emphasis, lw=0. If it is emphasized in one way, lw=1. If it is emphasized in two ways, lw=2, and so on.
I propose that the lawler (ll) be the standard unit of measure of the typographical emphasis applied to a text as a whole, and be calculated as the ratio of the total lawler weight of the characters to the total number of characters.
For example, consider the text of the two numbered paragraphs above. The italicized characters have lw=1; the others have lw=0. The overall typographical emphasis is around 0.04 (4%) lawler.
The overall typographical emphasis of the John Lawler answer² referred to by RegDwighт above is about 0.6 (60%) lawler.
(It is possible for a text to have a lawler greater than 1. The overall typographical emphasis of a paragraph which is both bolded and italicized in its entirety would be 2 (200%) lawler.)