Grandpa must be driving a train, a steamship, or a strip mining shovel. As for our more typical mileage, well, half a million is kind of a big number, a little unwieldly for everyday conversation.
Where did we get this term 'hogshead' anyway? My take on Wikipedia's explanation is that some old Viking branded (like with a red hot iron) his barrels of ale with the image of the head of an ox, so barrels of ale came to be known as ox-heads. By the time they got to North America a hundred years later, the term had been corrupted to hogshead. Or maybe somebody else started branding their barrels with the image of the head of a hog.
Just what do they call 'mileage' in countries that haven't been to the moon?
Update April 2016 replaced missing spreadsheet on account of Google changed the way spreadsheets are embedded.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r7x-RGfd0Yk#t=160 is a good explanation of the imperial system of measures ;-)
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