The simplest ordinal scale is a ranking. When a market researcher asks you to rank 5 types of beer from most flavourful to least flavourful, he/she is asking you to create an ordinal scale of preference.
There is no objective distance between any two points on your subjective scale. For you the top beer may be far superior to the second prefered beer but, to another respondant with the same top and second beer, the distance may be subjectively small.
An ordinal scale only lets you interpret gross order and not the relative positional distances.
