Hi people! How are all of
you doing? This is me cleaning some cobwebs, as it has been eons since I last put
up content here. I like to believe that I have valid reasons as to why, one
being I got a job! Yippee? Anyway, frankly, I just have become lazy. Enough
about that. Today, I would like to engage us in thinking about something that I
feel is a massive misnomer, especially among us Kenyan users of English.
 |
| "...measure your height and weight..." |
Every time I walk around
the streets of our urban centers, I constantly run into people with machines
that measure peoples ‘weight’. Weighing machines. However, today, during my
lazy hour – a time when I just sit and seriously mull about important issues
such as the meaning of the word ‘the’, life, yawning, why left is left and not right,
death and myriad other beautiful complexities – I thought about something.
Physicists define weight
as the force generated by gravitational pull on a body. They go ahead and
classify it as a vector quantity. That is, a quantity that has both a magnitude
and a direction. Quantities without direction are referred to as scalar
quantities; quantities such as speed, volume and temperature. Weight is a
vector because of the direction of gravitational force on a body, therefore it is
the magnitude of force acting directionally on an object.
Whenever we step on a
scale somewhere along Tom Mboya Street, we actually want to know the amount of
matter in us. Our mass. Has it increased, decreased or remained constant? Mass
is not affected by directional force and remains the same no matter where you
are in the universe. Physics measures mass in grams, while the S.I. unit of
weight is the newton. So all this raises the questions: Is it right to refer to
the contraptions we step on as weighing machines/scales and also, should we say
we are getting weighed/weighing ourselves? Technically, I think it’s incorrect.
I remember a question
that I got wrong once in primary school that went along the lines of: Which, between
a kilogram of cotton and a kilogram of rocks, weighs more? I once shamelessly
told Mr. Mangala the kilogram of rocks does. Needless to say, I was caned. I
thereafter always said the two weigh the same. But is it really true? Does a kilogram
of rocks on the moon weigh the same as a kilogram of cotton on earth?
Definitely not! Their mass is the same but their weight isn’t.
Grammar is not exempt from
this either. It is commonplace to hear someone say, “Weigh that bag of maize,” or hear a medical expert encourage
someone to regularly weigh themselves.
The nominal form ‘weight’ has birthed the verbal form ‘weigh’. Is it right, having
agreed that what the enquirers actually mean is for one to find out the mass of
something or oneself? I think grammarians should come up with a verb form of
the word ‘mass’ for this precise instant. I have seen a verb form of the word,
but its meaning is not remotely connected to the activity of stepping on top of
a scale. The dictionary I consulted from defines the verb form of the word mass
as: The action of joining together into a one body, as in:
The
crowd will mass outside the palace.
 |
| The other mass |
Should we come up with a
second meaning of the verb form?
Mass /mœs/ (verb): To determine the mass of
something. (I find this funny because I
remember joking around with one of my undergrad friends about how hard it’d be
to get a doctorate in Linguistics without inventing a new word, as we believed
all aspects of language had already been covered.)
And then we can construct
sentences such as: ‘I am going to mass
myself’ and ‘Make sure you mass
yourself every three months’.
I think we should. And
while we are at it, we should also change the names of our machines and how we
word our Mathematics questions. We should call them massing scales/machines and ask unwitting class six pupils which masses more between a kilogram of meat
and a kilogram of leaves. Am I thinking too much? Did someone else beat me to
this? If not, I reques…nay, I DEMAND to be recognized as the inventor of the second
definition of the verb ‘mass’. Let me know what you think :-)
.jpg)
First up, thanks for indulging me, I've enjoyed the read and am glad by how it got me thinking! :-)
ReplyDeleteSo i went on to get the basic definition of it.. Weight /wāt/ -a body's relative mass or the quantity of matter contained by it, giving rise to a downward force; the heaviness of a person or thing. And here's what i think..
If I've understood the definition correctly, weight is measured in relation to a body's mass. In essence, there can be no 'weight' for a body/substance with no 'mass'.
Further, considering that the massing machines (if i may call them that ;-)) really are designed to measure the amount of force exerted on them towards a specific direction (typically downwards) then i suppose it's correct enough to say they measure weight. After all, they wouldn't be measuring weight at all if say, they were inverted and had someone pushing upward against them.
So rather than measuring mass (in it's truest definition i.e quantity of matter contained in a body/thing), they actually measure the force generated by the mass of a given body. Now it so happens that the force in question here is the kind that accelerates downwards - as caused by gravity, which we both know to be what 'weight' truly is.
So I'd agree with Mr.Mangala that the weight of 1000kgs of cotton would be equal to that of 1000kgs of rocks. And i'd also agree with you that a kilogram of rocks on the moon weighs not the same as a kilogram of cotton on earth. Why so? Because it's a measure of force and not quantity of matter. While body's of equal mass would have the same weight on earth, the same cannot be true if either one of them is somewhere else in the universe. As the amount of gravitational force acting on an object varies with it's location on the universe, so does its weight.
So, as regards your proposition for change, I'm not sure the basis is full proof seeing as the machines do actually measure weight, except that their scales then calculate and report on mass. Wouldn't you agree?
...That doctorate may have to wait a little longer bud! ;-P
As always, thank you for stopping by, bud :-) i actually get you. So the 'weighing' scales calculate our mass from the weight that they measure. Hadn't thought about it that way. But if they are weighing scales, they should then report our weight in Newtons - the S.I. unit of weight? Calling them weighing scales, and getting a reading in Kilograms, seems irregular to me. Am I making sense?
ReplyDelete