I get inspiration for the Words of the Day from a lot of places. From merriam-webster, from wikipedia, from my inbox of word-genius and word-trivia. But some of you might be surprised that I get a lot of my inspiration from the animated series Archer.
It's a clever show. From the campy, clever comedy, to the irreverent humor. Hidden in all that, behind the slapstick humor, the silliness -- is a story told with intelligence, bite, and humor.
So I was watching an episode from early one, as I'm wont to do in the wee hours of the evening. And Archer was being drained of his blood, specifically from a "gill" of his blood. And I felt a tingle on my skin when I heard that, because I was about to come across a word that was rare, antiquated, interesting, and rare.
Gill -- a measure of liquids containing one fourth of a standard pint.
It’s often mentioned in the Lewis and Clark journals that whiskey was rationed out by the gill or dram. Joseph Whitehouse wrote on June 9, 1805, “…the officers gave the party a dram, the fiddle played and they danced late &c…”
How much was a gill? The Oxford English Dictionary defines a gill as "a measure of liquids containing one fourth of a standard pint." Thus, at one-fourth of a pint, a gill equates to four ounces. With two pints to the quart and four quarts to the gallon, there are 32 gills to the gallon. A fluid dram equals one-eighth of a fluid ounce (the equivalent to two average-size thimbles), so there would be 128 drams per pint and 1,024 drams per gallon. So, there are 32 drams in a gill.
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