Pottle

A conspiracy theory in a bottle

Today’s New York Times Spelling Bee letters:

E, N, O, P, T, U, and center L (all words must include L).

Merriam-Webster says…

Silly little dictionary! Don’t you know pottle can’t possibly be a word if the New York Times says it ain’t?

For further fascinating facts, check out the Spelling Bee Master.

What’s your favorite dord* from today’s puzzle?

My Two Cents

One of the challenges of visiting the United States, or moving there, is dealing with the system of units. The U.S. is not the only country in the world that hasn’t yet truly adopted the metric system, but it’s probably the best-known one.

Even though I was fortunate enough to study in an International School where I was taught all about inches, feet, quarts, gallons, and the terrifying Fahrenheit temperature scale, I still struggled with these measurements when I moved to the States. I’m pretty good at math and can quickly convert customary to metric units and vice-versa, but I soon realized that wasn’t the issue.

It had more to do with what I like to call the Firefox Rule. I’m not referring to the perennial bridesmaid in browser rankings, but rather the 1982 Clint Eastwood action thriller called… Firefox.

(Spoiler alert: there are some plot spoilers in the next paragraph. They might spoil a movie you had never heard of and had no plans of watching. Still, one must abide by the spoiler alert courtesy rule.)

In that movie, Eastwood’s character, a former Air Force pilot called Gant, is tasked with stealing the newest and bestest Soviet fighter jet, code-named… you guessed it, Firefox. Because Gant’s mother was Russian he speaks the language, a key advantage to using the airplane’s weapons, which are controlled by thought. Gant has no trouble flying the jet, but during a key scene he has to remember to think in Russian in order for the plane’s missiles to fire.

Looping all the back to feet and gallons… It was one thing to have learned all about them, but it was quite another to live with them on a daily basis. Sure, I was able to convert 45 degrees Fahrenheit to Celsius. (7.2, in case you’re wondering.) However, it was not the same as realizing that 45 degrees felt quite different in March (warm) than it did in November (effin’ cold!). I knew that a gallon was almost four liters, but I had no idea if I was paying less than for gas than my friends and family in Europe and Israel (I was) or how much a tankful would actually last me. And speaking of gallons…

Jack and Gill

As the dictionary tells us, a pottle is a measure equal to half a gallon. This is the sequence most people in the U.S. know:

1 gallon = 4 quarts 1 quart = 2 pints 1 pints = 2 cups 1 cup = 16 tablespoons 1 tablespoon = 3 teaspoons 1 teaspoon = 98.57813 drops

Yeah, everything looks nice and tidy until you get to drops. How the heck do you measure 0.57813 drops anyway. Well, maybe if you live in a Looney Tunes cartoon.

Missing from the above is the fluid ounce, which is equal to 2 tablespoons.

Thing is, there are several measurements which have long been hidden from us, and they are part of a sinister global conspiracy. These measures are:

1 minim = 1/60th of a fluid ounce 1 dram = 80 U.S. minims 1 gill = 2 jacks 1 jack = ½ pint 1 pottle = 2 quarts

In theory 2 jacks = 1 pint = 1 gill, but then some claim a gill is ¼ of a pint.

Clearly, the conspiracy behind not revealing these measurements is to make life much easier for everyone.

Now, those of you who love whisky might be familiar with the term dram as a small amount of this beloved spirit, but that usage is informal.

All this pottle talk (bad pun intended) brings back memories of the Great Tropicana Juice Debacle, also known as:

Marketing Madness

In 2008, Tropicana Juice decided to revamp and rebrand their iconic orange juice design and packaging. Key word in the previous sentence: iconic. That was their first mistake: you don’t “re” anything to something that is iconic. That’s the advantage of using iconic to describe your product’s design!

Tropicana’s second mistake was the ad agency they hired, which shut down five years later largely due to this fiasco.

Here are the plastic surgery photos, courtesy of TMZ:

I won’t go into all the details of why this rebranding failed miserably. Niklas Göke has done an excellent and thorough job with that, and I recommend you read his article.

The short version is that after pouring in around $35 million for a juice bottle makeover, Tropicana lost $20 million the first month of 2009 when the new product hit the shelves. By March the old packaging was back, but that didn’t stop the bleeding. Some experts estimate that the company lost $50 million in total.

So how does one go about getting back all that money? Well, here is today’s second conspiracy theory: you sell less juice for the same price.

Because I’m not a big orange juice drinker, I don’t remember the rebranded cartons. It’s possible I didn’t buy any during January of 2009. What I do recall is that the next year I realized I was being scammed.

I mentioned fluid ounces earlier. The typical Tropicana OJ pottles (or half gallons) had 64 fluid ounces, because 64 fluid ounces is two quarts, or half a gallon. A pottle.

But in 2010, at some point half a gallon became 59 ounces! The bottle seemed to be the same in size, which completely fooled you. But if you checked the fine print at the bottom of the carton, you noticed the difference.

Tropicana did change their cartons to plastic carafes a few years later, and this time did not lose a ton of moola. Encouraged by that, they downsized again, from 59 to 52 ounces. Guess what didn’t go down? The price, of course!

Why people got upset about packaging in 2009 and not an inflated price per unit in 2010 and 2018 is a mystery to me. Or maybe it’s another conspiracy connected to jacks and gills and minims. Who knows…

What’s clear to me now is that all those years I lived in the States, I could have gone to the supermarket and asked for a pottle of juice or milk, instead of a “half-gallon”.

Or not.

Because the editors of the Spelling Bee decided that pottle is a dord.*

Please check out my previous entry on another dord*:

*What the heck is a dord, anyway? Here you go: