Passed on to me by Joel Levin, from Mike Galos on Facebook on 7/25: A display of English wine cask units, from the largest to the smallest: tun, butt, puncheon, hogshead, tierce, barrel, rundlet, kilderkin, firkin, pin:
To which I add pipe, a synonym for butt, and of course the smallest unit, the gallon, whether imperial or US
For the most part, the names originated as everyday names of wine (or beer) containers of various sizes, then were extended to semi-technical or technical usage as the name of a volume of drink, in a process we might call technification — a process amply illustrated in the practices of biologists who adapt everyday vocabulary like fly, bug, worm, and petal as technical terms, and then often privilege their usage as the correct one, as if ordinary people were carelessly mis-using the vocabulary (yes, that pisses me off).
After a brief reflection on technification, I’ll pass to the vocabulary in the display above, noting that most of them are in frequent enough usage to make it into the New Oxford American Dictionary (a lexicography-based one-volume dictionary).
