[...] if I”m not wrong, then lets see you with your pet(s), or, if you have no pets, then lets see you with someone else”s pets or with a stuffed pet! Originally posted at 1:29PM, 28 January 2007 PDT ( permalink ) chrismaverick (a group [...]

Hey, what’s the problem?

People say “molecular weight” when they actually mean “relative molecular mass” quite frequently. As a biochemist in the UK, I use kg as a unit of weight at the Earth’s surface, because it is SI. At the Earth’s surface, mass and weight are equivalent.

I would never try weighing out 235.4 Newtons of urea, for example! No, it would be 24.024 kg.

The opposite occurs in the US, too. The pound is used to mean both mass and force.

Depends. Are we talking about a spring scale (force) or a balance (mass)?

I’ve got no problem with “mass” as a verb. Humans find verbs and nouns extremely flexible, and a word usually has many grammatical roles. I gather this is even worse in Chinese than English since Chinese is more strongly positional and much less inflected than English.

There are a lot of idioms involving common measurements. A sailor might say “The SS Slowboat makes 10 knots on the high seas” which sounds like the ship has taken up macrame.

Also, Americans shouldn’t be so smug about being non-metric. Try buying a half gallon of soda or a fifth of a gallon of liquor. Liquids, except for milk and a few other such products, are sold in liters. Look at your next supermarket receipt and see if you’ve bought one pound eight ounces of cheese. My supermarket says 1.50 pounds because the standard is now pounds and hundredths, not ounces. (I assume that the scales are piezoelectric and so measure weight, not mass).

I’m not surprised to find that Germans have a half kilo measure. The French have been using livres since before the Revolution, and they still do. Interestingly, they buy their computer screens in pouces, thumbs, which are American inches. Look at a French computer ad, and you might find centimeters in the fine print, but the screen size is in inches.

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This is great for filing computer files (at the beginning of the filename) – gotta try it to love it.

I think I have learned more about weights and mesures today than I ever have before. But being a Murrican, I am still not sure how many miles there is in a liter.

Perhaps someday we will all meet together and settle the mass/weight issue over a tun of wine. At around 260 gallons (US or Imperial??–don’t ask, don’t tell) I think a tun would be barely enough.

NOW–what really gets me peeved is the trend of the twenty-somethings around here saying the following:

My Bad!

On Accident!

No Problem!

Geez! I am starting to sound like my grandma the english teacher!

Yes, I know. It merely sounds passive, and my fault for forgetting the word “sounds.” It is, however, still wordier and clunkier than the other examples.

Hmm. If there are Grammar Nazis, then are there Grammar Neuremburg Trials?

“You stand accused of grammaring! How do you plead?”

“Grammaring? Verbing weirds words! Wait… um… I was only following Strunk and White?”

I suppose rather than hanging, though, if the Grammar Nazi is verdicted guity then I suppose his punishment would be copy-pasting neologisms on corporate intrablogs to leverage the enterprise to new paradigms of operational excellence by stepladdering ordinary, traying nouns into jetting verbs of powerfulness.

“I’m not short, I75 cm., but she was taller—I80,I learned later, and massed 70 kilos, all curves and as blond as Shorty was black.”

It may be that Phil picked up the habit of using “mass” as a verb from a lifetime of reading SF.

And I don’t have a problem with a star massing 10 brazillion tons. I do have a problem with obsoleting something, but just because it sounds funny. And I’ve never heard “obsolete” as a verb until just now, for the record.

Let’s look at it pragmatically. “The star masses twice as much as the Sun” is a nice, active voice sentence, but annoys the anti-verbers. “The star weighs twice as much as the Sun” works because of the fudgy nature of the word ‘weigh’ but annoys the mass-weight dichotomists. “The star has a mass that is twice that of the Sun” is as technically accurate as possible, but verbose, somewhat clunky, and passive voice.

Pragmatism: are you being paid by the word? If so, go for the last one. If not, then use whatever formulation flows best in the prose and is most likely to be correctly understood.

‘To weigh’ is perfectly acceptable most of the time as the context makes it clear what is meant. ‘Weight’ in English seldom refers strictly to the force an object exerts due to its gravity outside of the high-school physics classroom. Even in science, we talk about ‘atomic weights’ and ‘molecular weights’ in chemistry, for instance, when the context clearly implies mass.