Words especially in English are dynamic and have a variety of uses dependant upon which group of individuals are using them. For the scientific community you will hear “the correct usage of terms” related to the physical world. Amongst common man you will find terms that are acceptable to those who are ignorant and yet many understand what is meant.

One Winters afternoon my physics professor in college overheard me say, “It is cold outside”! He immediately corrected me by stating, “Cold is an absolute therefore there is a lack of heat”! I replied, “It is cold outside”! I still got an A from him. :)


>>>Which reminds me that in no country the SI unit for temperature (Kelvin) is in common use! This one seems to be reserved for scientific applications.
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>>Yeah, that one's got a long way to go catching on...
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>>>And then, of course, we have the continuos confusion of people saying that something "weighs" so-and-so many kilograms.
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>>I figure that's okay as long as people understand the difference (but mostly, they probablly don't understand, unfortunately). There isn't any good, widely understood verb-form of mass, is there? That may be part of the problem with this...you can say "measure" referring to taking a mass measurement, of course, but it's not very specific of a term.
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>>"Mass" has too many meanings, also, to make it a useful verb? ("To mass"?)
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>I would say "... has a mass of ... kg.". Unfortunately, this is more involved than the (incorrect) form: "... weighs ... kg.". AFAIK, there is no corresponding verb, that would make it simpler. This may be because the concept of "mass" is newer than the concept of "weight".