The "Ass-Load" Is a Completely Legitimate Unit of Measurement

Dr. Renée Trilling is a professor of English at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Her teaching and research emphases are in medieval English literature, so it is no coincidence that she discovered this passage in Natural Materials of the Holy Land and the Visual Translation of Place, 500-1500, a scholarly anthology published in 2017. Her photo is from p. 119 of Dr. Lucy Donkin's contribution titled "Earth from Elsewhere: Burial in Terra Sancta beyond the Holy Land."

Donkin's passage here relates to the movement of dirt from the grave of Saint Peter by Saint Lolan, an 11th Century Scottish bishop. That's a long haul from Rome, but four well-built asses were up to the charge. 

-via Rebecca B


Comments (7)

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According to the Bible, an ass-load is equivalent to 8 bushels. Formal calculations aside, let's just assume 60lbs/bushel so 480lbs. Camels can carry 40% of their body weight so here we're looking at up to 600lbs. Don't confuse any of this with a butt-load. A butt is two hogsheads @ +/- 63 gallons each so a butt-load is around 126 gallons. It's also a measure of weight equaling 2,016 lbs. The winner though is a shit-load (most people working today already know this. But I digress). Back when Boston shipped their sewage to New Jersey, a shit-load was one full sewage scow - 2.7 tons. And you're welcome for today's boatload of information
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As an Engineer, I can tell you that the number one thing we value is management that's willing to concede that they don't know as much as we do and who won't presume to mutilate projects through their ignorance.

Too often fidgety management seems to feel like they ought to be *doing* something. "Helping", in their minds. Don't. We got it. That one *little* thing you want to change for no reason beyond whimsy? It's not little when I have to redo the models and the drawings and lag the machine shop who just got done doing the tooling. And that's not even considering how many other issues your *little* addition is creating inadvertently that now have to be addressed. So, while I know it bruises your already ropey ego, shut up, go away, and let me do my job. Don't you have a report to file or something?
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RCA would take a carefully engineered prototype TV fresh from the engineers and proceed to cut components out of it. If the TV still worked without the component then that component was left out of the final design. The resulting TV sort of worked.
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The tool and die industry still hasn't recovered from the recession, and most engineers I know have taken up construction work because it's all that's available.
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Having a mistress and a wife. That way the wife thinks he is with the mistress. The mistress thinks he is with the wife. While he is at work.
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