Hogsheads sound like a fictional unit of measure made up to mock the imperial system.
Fun fact: hogsheads are abbreviated as hhds :)
The metric system is unintuitive but standardized.
The imperial system is intuitive but (traditionally) non-standardized.
A standardized but unintuitive system is useful in modern science and engineering, where reliability and precision are of utmost importance.
An intuitive but non-standardized system is useful for day-to-day communication and conceptualization, where a standard deviation away from the average of the unit's reference does not have a meaningful effect.
Before standardization, many old units of measurement could be immediately related to everyday things, making conceptualization simple and intuitive.
Examples:
Imperial pound of mass: A pound of wheat berries is more or less how many wheatberries I can fit in my hand. I deal with wheat berries and my hands every single day - I can quite concretely conceptualize a pound and more or less relate that pound (of wheat berries) to other things: a pound of meat, a pound of wool, etc.
Imperial acre: An acre is more or less the amount of land that a pair of oxen can plow in a day. In our old little village, oxen and farm fields are something we observe every single day, and so an acre is conceptually intuitive to us.
Ancient cubit: This is more or less the length of my forearm, which again serves as a very useful reference point for measuring and conceptualizing things. Say I go to build a cabinet. I may measure in cubits. Then, when I go to cut lumber, I just measure it with my forearm, cut, and that's it.
Imperial hogshead: I speculate this barrel size is more or less either the size of an ox's head, or can tightly fit one inside it. Again, this is an animal I might observe daily, making conceptualization simple.
Note that a standard deviation of the size of an average man's hand or forearm, or of the amount of land a given pair of oxen can plow on a given day, does not have a meaningful impact on how I use and relate these units of measurement to everyday life - I'm not precision engineering a space telescope here. I'm just buying wheat berries, plowing fields, and building cabinets.
Contrast these origins with metric's.
Metric meter: "one ten-millionth of the distance between the North Pole and the Equator through Paris" - whoa get me outta here! I can't relate that to anything I encounter in my day-to-day life.
Metric gram: "the mass of one cubic centimeter of water", or "the mass of one cubic 'one hundredth of one ten-millionth of the distance between the North Pole and the Equator through Paris' of water"
Of course we can still more or less relate these metric units to things in our day-to-day life for better conceptualization, but because they're arbitrary, they don't map 1:1, whereas imperial and ancient units were naturally emergent rather than arbitrary and they mapped one to one per their definitions.
This is why imperial is a more useful system for relaying measurements colloquially, for everyday life.
1. What is a "wheatberry"? 2. What is an "oxen"? 3. How long is "a day"?
What's completely balderdash about it? The definition of centimeter is accurate, so it cannot be the case that the post is completely balderdash? Like you've requested with my oxen and my days and my wheat berries, perhaps you could you also be more precise?
Again, the point is that you use these measurements in situations where micrometer-tier precision is unnecessary. You can hear "pound", immediately be able to conceptualize it, and then move on with your life, not waste all day haggling with the merchant over his wheat berries that happen to be 0.2mm shorter on average than what you typically might consider to be a wheat berry.
For one, many units are actually defined using relatable things like your example: "the mass of one cubic centimeter of water". Here, one always buys water in in 0.5 litre, 0.75 litres or 1 litre (=0.5,0.75 and 1 kilo), so it's even more relatable than your hand of berries (I literally had half a unit kilo weight in my hand an hour ago). Or celsius, 100 is boiling point of water and 0 is freezing point, which you will also encounter in your daily life (cooking and your fridge, at least approximately) and are easy to relate.
But more importantly, it doesn't matter. Most "personal" definitions are vague. My girlfriend is significantly shorter and a meter is way longer for here than for me, also her forearms are like two thirds of my forearm. Nobody knows how a meter is defined and I think many have forgotten how a gram or a kilo are defined, it's a scale you internalise. How to define them, that's up to the scientist. The day to day advantage is that it's so easy to calculate with these units and every single unit has the same concept behind it (from current to weight to acceleration).
Metric units can certainly be adapted to be fractionally relatable, though their origins are certainly not, as I mentioned:
>we can still more or less relate these metric units to things in our day-to-day life for better conceptualization, but because they're arbitrary, they don't map 1:1, whereas imperial and ancient units were naturally emergent rather than arbitrary and they mapped one to one per their definitions.
The grandparent comment mentioned how nonsensical or absurd "hogshead" is as a unit of measurement, and the essence of the response was that "hogshead" is actually rather sensical, originating from something very relatable and natural.
So, its an appeal to nature then? Somehow, I doubt it'd make a difference if meter was derived from the total lengths of bishops mitres at parish (everyone knows how tall those hats are - relatable!).
Units are only "intuitive" because that's what you've internalized - similar to how the the golden age of music was when one was a teenager or young adult.
>an appeal to nature then
No. It's an explanation that imperial & similar ancient measurement units were adopted with the goal of being simple and intuitive for people to quickly understand. This was accomplished by choosing immediately relatable reference points. In the case of a hogshead barrel, that reference point was the ox head.
A mile, that's 1000 paces, that's both simple to remember and intuitive.
A kilometer, that's 621.4 paces, that's neither simple to remember nor intuitive.
No unit in the metric system maps simply to anything a human can immediately relate to, this is by definition of each unit in the system.
This "intuition" is not intrinsic, though, but is because of familiarity. If you've done track sports (or watched athletics), you can visualize 100m. If you've watched NFL, you can "intuit" 10 yards empirically - not because it equals to 30 feet and you look at your own feet. The same goes for 21"/27"/42"/60" (TVs).
The only scenario I can imagine where of human-relatibility would matter is when the unit is unknown to the listener, e.g. if someone introduced me to a carlength (or the notoriously unintuitive 'length of a football field'); however, this is now completely unnecessary with modern education and standardization
The origin of the measure is just lore, and counts for nothing; which is why being immersed into a system which you were previously unfamiliar with (metric or imperial) bestows the same "intuitiveness" - as anyone who joined the US army can tell you.
The argument that imperial units are somehow relatable as they are similar to naturally occurring things is a textbook appeal to nature.
Nobody who uses meters outside of setting the international standard or working in particle physics would have a working idea where they denoting meters in wavelengths of radioactive decay or hemisphere spanning fractions. They approximate it to something they can relate to just like you do. It's easy to skewer imperial units too with silly examples stories e.g. Fahrenheit.
Similarly just because it's convenient to me to think of (mile!) country roads, quarter sections, and acres from familiarity despite using metric elsewhere due to the grids from historical land allocations in Western Canada doesn't devalue other ways of measuring.
If you want to be rude, do it, but be direct about it and own it. Or rather, don't be rude. Please do not presume anything about the author of a comment nor attempt to make personal attacks against the author, as it's not only rude, it's irrelevant to the substance. I am not the substance of my comment, the origins and intuitiveness of units of measurement is the substance.
>Similarly just because it's convenient to me to think of (mile!) country roads, quarter sections, and acres from familiarity despite using metric elsewhere due to the grids from historical land allocations in Western Canada doesn't devalue other ways of measuring.
I agree.
Why then, haven't imperial analogs appeared for data storage?
"This hard drive is old, about 87 Shakespeare's"
"Oh, Twitter was ruined for me when they increased the character limit to a Poem"
"We are web-scale, we serve fourscore Libraries of congress worth of video per second"
The Irish for hogshead and barrel can be found at https://www.focloir.ie
Perhaps the Gaelic word for barrel somehow came from the English measurement hogshead, but more likely that it was spoken Gaelic for barrel overheard and adopted by English speaking stevedores.
The other problem is that there is no known Irish etymology for either tocsaid or oigiséad, or Malcolm McLennan would have included it in his faclair, but there is a plausible English one. Other Germanic languages (Dutch, German, Danish, Swedish) have variants of ox-head. Whether it originated in one of those languages or in English is disputed.