"Gone is the hogshead, cask and demijohn! Gone is the tub, and the pail, and the tierce!"

     So laments a traveling salesman in Meredith Wilson's musical, The Music Man. To which comes the logical reply, "Look, wha'da'ya talk? Wha'da'ya talk? Wha'da'ya talk?"

     Of course, any piker knows that a hogshead is a large cask of varying sizes, between 63 and 140 gallons (the U.S. standard is 63 gallons). Two hogsheads equal one pipe...a third of which is a tierce. Anyone who's grad-ji-a-tid the second grade oughta know that!

     A demijohn? I'm glad you asked. It is a narrow-necked, wicker-wrapped bottle that holds from 1 to 10 gallons. (Nothing like standardization, is there?) According to French folk lore, the name comes from dame-jeanne (literally, Lady Jane). However, the name is more likely a corruption of Damaghan, a city of old Persia know for its glass works.

     By the way, how much is a 10-penny nail? Believe it or not, penny, in this case, is an indication of weight, not price, being a broad corruption of pound. The unit of measurement for nails has always been per thousand. Thus a 10-penny nail weights 10 lbs. per thousand; a 4-penny nail weighs 4 lbs. per thousand, and so on. I'll bet a lot of hardware clerks don't know that.

     Face it, we Americans don't like change. If we did, we would be leading the way in metric conversion, instead of acting as a sea anchor. Now, before you brand me a communist right out of Hanoi, think about it. Doesn't 104.8 km per hour sound a lot racier than 65 mph?

Acknowledgments: 3, 4, 30

© Russ Brown, 1998