A buttload

I've used the expression before and I've heard others use it as well. But what does it refer to?

Volume. 126 US Gallons to be precise. Or at least as precise as you can be with such a dumb measurement.

It all started by looking up Boric Acid since it's been in the news with the Japan nuclear incident. I wanted to know how the stuff worked. And why.

I didn't get that far since I was distracted by a new unit of measure that I'd not encountered before: a barn. A barn is a unit of area that's really rather small. It dates back to world war II and it was comparing something relatively big to smaller stuff. The uranium nucleus was "as big as a side of a barn" when compared to smaller ones. "Big" in this case is 10^-28 m^2.

Then it just got plain silly.

A micro-barn is an outhouse and a yocto-barn is a shed.

Truth be told I had to double-check the references on that one.

Then I remembered another strange unit: the micro-fortnight. It's just a bit more than a second and comes to us from the humorous FFF system of measurement: Furlong/Firkin/Fortnight.

I knew what a furlong and fortnight are, but what the fuck is a firkin? It's not a merkin.

That's where I found the butt.

A butt is two hogsheads or 1-1/2 firkins or 7 buttkins. Now a hogshead is 63 gallons so a butt is 126 gallons. By that account a firkin is 84 gallons.

A friend of mine had the idea of coming up with a fake system of measures for his kids. It just seems that the English did exactly that. All sorts of random things that were made up as they went along and never let on that it's all just a hideous joke.

A buttkin? Seriously?

I did a bit of looking and found out that a Peterbuilt truck (The model 389 in this case) holds almost a buttload of diesel -- it comes up just six gallons short at 120 gallons -- 0.95 buttloads. That is unless you get the bigger tanks -- then you have 1.19 buttloads of fuel.

Now an Olympic sized pool... that's 5238 buttloads of water.