I fancy myself something of a wordsmith. That affinity comes from a love of reading and writing and, in part, from the ego-boosting number of times over the years people have asked, “Hey, can you wordsmith this for me?” — a request which I always happily honor.
So when I miss a word, or misplay one, it’s well-deserved comeuppance. Such was the case recently when I wrongly tried to convince someone that the word “buttload” was nothing but a crude and erroneous bastardization of the more proper “boatload.”
Blame Nacho Libre.
If you’re not familiar with the 2006 Jack Black comedy film, “Nacho Libre” is the story of a humble cook at a Mexican orphanage who dreams of becoming a luchador — a professional wrestler — in part to make money to purchase better ingredients to spice up his lousy cooking. It’s a hilarious movie (inspired by a true story) with an endless supply of one-liners that, 14 years after its debut, I still toss occasionally at my wife. (“So anyways, let’s get down to the nitty-gritty,” and “Do you not realize I have had diarrhea since Easters?” are two favorites.) To this day, I still can’t convince Lee Ann to watch the movie with me when it comes on cable. It’s not her brand of humor.
It was in re-watching “Nacho Libre” a few years ago with the closed-captioning “on” (something we often do — my hearing’s OK; I just want to make sure I get all the words right) that I was first exposed to that word. There’s a scene where Ignacio (“Nacho” is his wrestling name) — eating toast with his crush Encarnacion, a nun who teaches at the orphanage — makes a remark about his “buttload” of knowledge about the Gospel in a lament about how he was destined to be more than just a lowly cook.
I’ll concede that this movie has its share of slightly off-color moments. But when I saw “buttload” on the closed-captioning on the screen, I was taken aback. I assumed it was an intentional and inappropriate send-up of “boatload” or one of those odd misspellings you occasionally see if you’ve ever watched anything with subtitles on the screen. Either way, I thought it was an error.
There are about 170,000 words in the English language — or just 100,000 if you’re playing Scrabble — and the average person uses roughly 35,000 of them. If you memorize the 107 acceptable two-letter Scrabble words (like I once did) you’ll have a leg up on some of your friends. Any way you slice it, though, 35,107 is still a boatload of words.
And way more, as it turns out, than a buttload.
While “boatload” isn’t an exact measurement, “buttload,” as it turns out, may be. A “butt” is an old word for a large cask used for transporting commodities such as wine, I now know. One definition I read said a butt was equal to six seams; a seam is a unit of measurement equal to eight bushels. Which makes a butt how much? Roughly 126 gallons — and, at nearly eight pounds per, a pretty heavy burden for anyone trying to carry it.
Modern cargo ships, which carry hundreds of millions of pounds of freight, literally carry a boatload of stuff wherever they go. So while there’s no standardized measurement for a boatload, one writer who explored the boatload/buttload question did some math and figured that one particularly large cargo ship that could carry more 8,000 containers had a capacity for exactly 54,107,280 gallons.
Definitely a boatload more than a buttload.
So when referring to an exclamatory amount, I’m sticking with boatload.
As for buttload? Let’s get down to the nitty-gritty: now that I know it’s a real thing, if the occasion arises to write it again, I’ll do it the way a wordsmith should. Which is the hyphenated modernization of what the Saxons wrote 200 years ago: butt-load.
And I’ll up my word count to 35,108.
