THE INNER PEDANT AND THE KILOGRAM

I heard a scientist on the radio yesterday, describing how much the Earth weighs... in kilograms.

Oh the Inner Pedant in me loves this kind of outrage. He bubbles like a Disney villain in furious clouds of purple smoke with triangular eyes and a shadowy glint of pride.

"In kilograms??" he cries, lightning exploding around his head as he grows skyward with rage.

I have to keep him locked up these days, the Inner Pedant. You see, he's really rather anti-social. He's the guy that interrupts you to tell you that it should be 'fewer' and not 'less' and that you're an uncivilised buffoon if you put the milk in before the tea.

The problem is that this scientist happens to be the emeritus professor at the International Bureau of Weights and Measures and to be honest, he really ought to know better. You'd let it go if it were anyone else - but someone like that, you really would expect to choose their words a bit more carefully.

Here's my theory. It's OK for language to change and adapt, as long as you get your point across. Alright, "you're" and "your" are gratingly different and OK, "their, there and they're" aren't really all that interchangeable - but these differences exist to make communication much richer and much easier. Part of the beauty of having such a flexible language is that we can communicate more powerfully, more eloquently, more beautifully with it - and that's the point: it's there to help us communicate.

The Inner Pedant can fume away indignantly but the professor on the radio got his point across perfectly well didn't he? You and I weigh things and we take a measurement in stones, kilograms, pounds and ounces. These are the units flashing back at us from our bathroom scales! Surely this is the language we can understand from our own experience? You'd be considered odd if you went along to WeightWatchers, hoping to lose a few Newtons at the weigh-in.

That's why I (minus the IP for a moment) am not too bothered by this textbook error. I doubt many people would have noticed, but you can guarantee some people will have already written in, angrily lamenting about standards and gravity and the universal constant and all the rest of that stuff that sent us to sleep in Physics.

It matters if you're an astronaut, I'll grant you that, but then I'm not sure they can pick up Radio 4. For the rest of us, bound here to this big old rock, I reckon we can keep on determining our mass by measuring the force we exert on the bathroom scales and translating the result proportionally into the internationally recognised units of mass which we casually choose to describe as weight. I reckon that's alright.

Sometimes the Inner Pedant just makes life heavier than it needs to be. I mean, more massive... oh do be quiet.