Brilliant, well done!

Thanks for that. I guess all orthography is arbitrary to a lesser or greater extent.

What I have never been sure about is why it is an 'e' that was stacked. As your phonetic transcriptions show, it never represented the presence of an [e]-like sound, but ae/oe/ue are used even today when umlaut isn't available or can't be used. So is the 'e' simply supposed to represent fronting?

I just checked but alas there is not a single incidence of 'arseload', let alone 'an arseload of' in the Spoken BNC2014

Haha yes, I know the feeling. I also should be doing other things … The singular/plural dimension is mysterious, e.g. we found 'people/things/money' are the 3 most frequent nouns after both a lot of and lots of, but then 'time' is 4th most frequent after a lot of but is not frequent after lots of. 🤷‍♂️

One of my favourite findings was the difference between 'a load of' and 'loads of', with the former being massively favoured when talking pejoratively, e.g., 'a load of b******s'. Book here: www.candlinandmynard.com/englishgramm...

@eltresearch.bsky.social and I looked at both 'a … of' and '[plural] of …' quantifiers in our new book based on an analysis of the Spoken BNC2014. Neither 'a ton of' or 'tons of' made it into our frequency-based tables, surprisingly given your analysis shows they are still used frequently in UK Eng

Come on, 10am! More than enough time for several coffees get you in grammar mood/mode!