cubic gallons

[Jonathan Lighter]

Scrooge McDuck's Money Bin No. 1 contains "three cubic acres" of cash.  Scrooge creator Carl Barks meant this as a joke, but cf. http://lists.drizzle.com/pipermail/rockhounds/2005-September/014210.html  (Sept. 6, 2005) :

         Please check your math. A cubic acre is about 9, 000,000 cubic feet...

          I didn't see that "1,000,000 bbl per acre" in the story.
         An acre is 208.7 ft by 208.7 ft.  If you go 208.7 ft
         deep and fill the cubic acre with pure oil, it is about
         195,000 bbls of oil if my math is correct.



And for the historically minded, _Mother Earth News_ (May-June 1977) at  http://www.motherearthnews.com/library/1977_May_June/Newsworthies:

 According to Sam Freedman, a single "cubic acre" of earth would satisfy all of    southern California's electricity needs for a full year!

Ah, but *finding* it....



JL

Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at YALE.EDU> wrote:
---------------------- Information from the mail header -----------------------
Sender: American Dialect Society
Poster: Laurence Horn
Subject: Re: cubic gallons
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

At 5:40 PM -0500 9/23/05, Mullins, Bill wrote:
> >
>> In the continuing absence of a reply from someone with actual
>> knowledge,
>
>Here's some actual knowledge. "Cubic gallons" is ignorance on the part
>of the user. "Cubic" is used when describing volume to modify a linear
>measure -- cubic meters, cubic yards, cubic inches, etc. "Gallon" is a
>measure of volume already, so adding "cubic" to it only confuses the
>matter.
>
It wouldn't be the only one. Googling "cubic gallons" turns up 501
hits, but "square acres" yields 30,300. The vacuous measure is here
to stay.

L


---------------------------------
Yahoo! for Good
 Click here to donate to the Hurricane Katrina relief effort.