I used to think that coffee makers were uniquely weird, since they considered a cup to be six ounces rather than eight. Then I bought a rice cooker and encountered the same unit of measure. A cup of rice was only six ounces. No wonder nobody cooks anymore, just when you figured out how many cups are in a pint, pints in a quart, and quarts in a gallon, along comes Mr. Coffee™ and everyone is confused. Suddenly, the other night, I figured it all out.
I was preparing for my Second Friday Show and Tell, the topic of the month being art, and looking through my coin collection. I have a set of proof silver Pillar Dollars from Mexico that was minted shortly after the Mexico City Mint did a housecleaning and found the original dies from 1732. The set includes a 1/10-ounce, 1/4-ounce, 1/2-ounce, ounce and troy pound version of the original silver dollar. (The Pillar Dollar was actually 8 reales, the source of such terms as "pieces of eight" and "two bits," as well as the alleged source of our "$" symbol.) A troy pound is actually only 12 ounces, rather than 16 ounces as with a pound avoirdupois. We have units of measure of dry pints and liquid pints, might there be a "troy pint?"
If there is a troy pint, it would be (logically) 12 liquid ounces. Since beer normally is served in pints (and quarts), this explains our 12-ounce beer cans -- they are troy pints! Suddenly I was onto something. This probably dates back to our revolution, when we rebelled against everything British, including 8-ounce cups of heavily taxed tea and 16-ounce pints of beer. What a revelation. We secretly adopted the Hellenic system of measure. Half of a pint is a cup, hence the 6-ounce cups of coffee and rice.
Carrying this further, a troy quart would be 24 ounces, and a troy gallon would be 96 ounces, rather than 32 and 128 respectively for their avoirdupois equivalents. This even explains why we sell hard liquor in fifths of a gallon or four-fifths of a quart. 25.4 ounces is pretty close to the troy quart.
96 ounces in a troy gallon. Did this influence ? and the Mysterians years ago when they wrote "96 Tears?" One-ounce tears, talk about alligator tears. Maybe ? was a student of Hellenic history which influenced his music.
And what about Helen of Troy? Isn't she the one whose face launched a thousand ships? That has always seemed a bit strange, was she really very ugly and the people were trying to get away from her like today's boat people? No, not at all. She was allegedly the most beautiful woman in all of Greece. I think that her people were merely drinking to her beauty, and consumed 1000 gallons of wine. Literacy was not real common back then, and someone wrote galleons rather than gallons. The eventual mistranslation resulted in a gross misunderstanding that remains today.
So there you have it. The woman who was associated with the great horse influenced the packaging of beer and soda. This may even be the real reason that our largest brewer maintains a stable of Clydesdale horses, in honor of the Trojan horse and the troy pint. Who would have ever suspected this?
DISCLAIMER: The above is historical humor, it is a joke and should not be taken seriously. Editors of the various tabloids might consider it truth and historical fact, but this is not a tabloid.