On Sun, 28 Sep 2003 18:04:26 GMT, Richard Clark
wrote:

Dr, Wilkins saying that he hath read for him in his
church) that is poor and a debauched man, that the College have
hired for 20s. to have some of the blood of a Sheep let into his
body
Contains a Pound reference you obviously missed (from the exchange
rate of 20 Shillings). Now, as every good Englishman would have
understood back then, this was a conversion. If he held 20 coins they
were NOT a Pound which is a single coin. There is an equivalency, but
this does not constitute an equality. Pepys could have written 1£
that is shorter, but he did not as it was obviously not what was
tendered to the debauched man.

Hi All,

The application of the monetary unit is not without is antecedents in
weight. The ancients, that is the pre-Newtonians, did not comprehend
the separable notion of mass from weight as they did not accept the
concept of "force" which was largely rejected by scientists of
Newton's day. In fact, Newton introduced the notion of forces in his
treatise "Opticks."

However, to return to the legacy of £. The symbol is drawn from
Libra. I have already discussed the operation of the balance scale
and its relationship to Libra is evident in the astrological
application. Libra (as is the latinate pondo) was the unit of weight
(not scientific mass, they had no such distinction) in ancient Rome.

I notice that our correspondent who relies on scientific cut-and-paste
retorts to dismiss scientific workers; and, as an acknowledged
untutored English speaker (several classes notwithstanding) also
leverages dictionaries to the same poor quality of transliteration.

The OED (which I am sure to get copious and unreliable rebuttal to)
offers of "mass" a physics application buried quite deeply within the
usage of this word across time (the OED is a dictionary of enumerated
usage by time, not by current application). For many hundreds of
years, mass merely meant the agglomeration of stuff (it didn't matter
what or why). Through the work of Newton's introduction of the
concept of force, the term, by OED account, then gained a distinction
such that they offer the definition:
"6.b. Physics. The quantity of matter which a body contains;
in strict use distinct from weight. 1704"

This is a pleasurable aside, these side bars of minutia to our usual
concerns. A do enjoy the drama queens that our group attracts and
the revisionist logic that attends their petty issues. Forgive me
Gene, but you don't have much else to offer and you will be gone soon
anyway, so go away mad (to invert an old saw). ;-)

73's
Richard Clark, KB7QHC