I was going to say Jersey…but yeah.
It works in Appalachian, too, but that’s because there, both words have an R.
Let me start up the Bass-O-Matic 76.
Who the hell cares how much it weighs? How much does the pint COST!
If it’s too much I’ll stumble to the pub down the street instead
I lived my entire life in NJ up until about 6 years ago. They don’t talk like that there.
And water certainly does rhyme well enough with quarter unless you’re completely anal about enunciation.
Your statement here is simply incorrect. The kilogram is a unit of mass, not weight; the weight of a liter of water varies depending on the local gravitational field, and acceleration that the water is undergoing. On Earth, a liter of water that is still relative to the surface of the Earth would weigh 9.8 newtons. It would weigh more if you measured it on a rocket taking off from Earth, and less if you measured it on the Moon or Mars, but in all cases would mass 1 kilogram.
I’m guessing you’d rhyme “quarter” with “courter” rather than “carter”, am I right?
Words have varying meaning. You often have to use experience to determine which meaning to use based on context. When someone says something weighs one kilogram it is understood that we are talking about the force that one kilogram exerts on earth in the places that humans can be found. I know it causes confusion sometimes but language is tricky.
Precisely.
It masses a kilogram, if you want to be precise. It weighs 9.8 newtons here on the earth.
I’m still waiting for gym equipment to be calibrated in newtons, though. Our stuff is all in pounds, since it comes from the States, and maybe if you’re lucky, there might be a mass in kilograms on the weight plates. In this case, though, weight in pounds is more correct than mass in kilograms, since we’re dealing with forces and resistance and all that. Add the fact that people still tend to speak of their own personal mass as ‘weight’, and typically specify it in pounds, and it’s just another example of the muddle we’re in. Pound-mass or pound-weight? Arrggh.
And here’s Wikipedia on the pint.
I always thought that the pint/pound thing was about volume, an idea that came from learning to cook at an early age. (16oz=pint, 8oz=cup, etc.)
It is. The adage is merely expressing the equivalence between a one-pint volume of water and one pound of weight.
If you’re hiking across a desert and you have to plan how much water you need/can carry, knowing that a US gallon is about 8 1/3 pounds is extremely helpful (well, to all us US non-metric cavemen).
Meh. I’ll stop using the kilogram as a unit of weight as soon as quantum physicists stop using the gigaelectronvolt (a unit of energy) as a unit of mass. Or as soon as I leave the Earth. Whichever comes first.
Mass and energy are identical.
Modulo a conversion factor (e.g., c^2). But then, mass and weight are also identical modulo a conversion factor (e.g., the gravitational acceleration of the Earth). Granted, c^2 is a fundamental physical constant, while the gravitational acceleration of the Earth is less crisply defined and not, in some sense, of such intrinsic importance, but both conflations seem equally tolerable to me, in contexts where no significant confusion results.
Granted, when you say “mass and energy are identical”, you mean “Whatever you see as mass, you can ‘tilt your head’ and think of as energy instead, and vice versa”, which is somewhat stronger than what I mean in saying “mass and weight are identical” [that there is a standard isomorphism between the two], but I think the tolerability of semi-ordinary language conflation is the same in the two cases.
I’ll tell you what: the next time I can find a butcher who will let me buy a newton of ham, I’ll be sure to let you know.