[Zero Sum]

That was my little way of saying that he was correct, but that I was talking about a different definition of the word (see post 67).

Correction: See post 73, which was a response to post 67.

[Mad Dawg]

But but, MY definition is right! Because, well, because it just IS!

I trust that clears things up.

Seriously, my dirty little secret is that I was never sure that I understood the conversation in Collitch in 1965. So all these years I have blustered around pretending that I did and that I was correct in my distinction.

But since I am not really sure that I’m right (which pretty much characterizes most of my life anyway), I am watching you with gratitude as you hammer it out.

The virtue, I thought, of my way of using the words is that it seemed to present a useful pair of attributes of measurement. And, in my l’arnin’ ths topic came up in our first semester lab, as I said, the topic of which was “Theory of Measurement”.

Measurement, the attempt to associate usefully numbers with stuff, is something we take for granted, right up until we realize that if we measure the shoreline of Great Britain with rods we will get a smaller number than we get if we measure it with a foot-rule, and far smaller that if we measure it in “palms” or “digits”.

Then we have to ask, okay, what are we doing here?