Carat
Equal to 200 milligrams, a measure of the weight of precious stones.
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posted by Robin at
4:15 AM
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4 Comments:
As someone who is an afficionado of gemstones and related fields, I have to concur with your assessment. The carat is a terrible measurement, which makes the purchase of stones infinitely more difficult by the fact that it's nigh impossible to produce an idea of something which weights "n carats." Grams would be far better.
-P.
By
Anonymous, at 3/31/2005 10:26 AM
I thought "carat" was supposed to refer to the percentage of real gold in the object, or something along those lines.
By
Anonymous, at 3/31/2005 3:25 PM
Word, P. I tried to emphasize the 200 mg in the definition for that reason; I think most people would be surprised to know that that's the word's meaning.
I think the carat's persistence is odd because it's a clean 200 mg, as opposed to 236.478 or something like that. The secondary/intrinsic definitions of measures like "second" and "meter" are many-digited, unwieldy numbers that are nice to shorten. For sales purposes, though, I think "four carats" is more impressive than ".8 grams."
David, I believe "karat" refers to purity, where an (n)k gold ring is 100(n/24)% pure gold. "Carat" refers to mass.
By
Robin, at 4/02/2005 3:38 PM
Isn't karat more obscure than carat? I mean a fifth of a gram is one thing, but who decided that 24 karats = 100% pure?
By
J'Nose, at 5/12/2005 10:09 PM
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