On 15/02/2021 00:08, Peter Duncanson [BrE] wrote:
On Sun, 14 Feb 2021 23:16:25 +0000, phil wrote:

On 14/02/2021 21:01, Ken Blake wrote:
On 2/14/2021 1:51 PM, phil wrote:
On 14/02/2021 18:48, Ken Blake wrote:
On 2/14/2021 10:00 AM, Quinn C wrote:
* micky:

Jack and Gill
Went up the hill
To fetch a pail of water
Jack fell down

Â*Â* and proceeded to drown,
Â*Â* but her gills saved Gill from slaughter.

Sorry, not used to the spelling "Gill".


It's always been "Jack and Jill" to me. Oddly, it' spelled "Jill" in
the subject line, but "Gill" in the text.

Since the well-known word for a fish's breathing organ is "gill,"
pronounced with a hard "g," when I saw "Jack and Gill, I wanted to
also pronounce "Gill" with a hard "g."


One sixth of a gill (soft g) was the standard measure for spirits in a
pub WIWAL.


I know of the unit of volume gill, but in my experience it's very rarely
used in the USA. I don't think I've ever heard it, and I always thought
it was pronounced like the fish organ, with a hard G. Your message
prompted a web search, and I see that I was wrong.



Looking at the Wiki article, I see that a gill is also a teacup. We are
in cross-thread territory. A teacup, of course is not the same as a cup,
although a US gill is half a cup.

And half a gill is a jack, which brings us nicely back to the original
topic.

"A Gill and a Half
went up the hill
..."



"To fetch 21.1 to 352 gills of water"
or perhaps more realistically
"To fetch 128 gills of water"

(Wiki
"A pail is a technical term, used in the shipping industry, to designate
a type of cylindrical shipping container with a capacity of about 3 to
50 litres (1 to 13 US gal)."

"The non-technical meaning is identical to bucket."

"As an obsolete unit of measurement, at least one source documents a
'bucket' as being equivalent to 4 imperial gallons (18 l; 4.8 US gal)."