This time of year you see all the pumpkins for sale and most are priced by the pound… it always reminds me of when our daughter, Kelly, was probably 4 or 5 years old. A friend had taken her to a pumpkin patch or a fall festival or something like that and she came home with a pumpkin that was almost as big as she was. When we asked her where she got it, she said she won it. When asked how, she explained that everyone was supposed to guess how many labels and she guessed the number of labels that was the closest, so she won it.
It took a long time, but we finally figured out that the contest was to guess how much the pumpkin weighed and the person who came the closest got the pumpkin. It turns out that the sign said, “Guess how many lbs. and win the pumpkin.” So Kelly came the closest. We tried to explain that lbs. wasn’t labels, but stood for pounds, but she looked at us like we were really stupid and pretty much told us we didn’t know what we were talking about. How stupid can you be if you think the abbreviation for pound is lb? Of course we gave up trying to convince a 4 or 5 year old, but I always wondered why we abbreviate pound that way.
If you look it up, you’ll find that supposedly lb is actually an abbreviation for the Latin word libra. But the problem with that, in my mind at least, is that libra in Latin originally meant “stone.” If you dig deeper, or as I like to say — do extensive research, lb is an abbreviation of the word libra, which could mean a pound, but libra itself is a shortened term of the full expression, libra pondo, which means “pound weight.” Pondo, by the way, is the origin of the English pound. So it seems to me that they cut off the wrong half of the expression when looking to abbreviate pound.
My extensive research also reminded me that Libra is also an astrological sign — the seventh sign of the zodiac. The name was given to a rather uninspiring constellation, with no particularly bright stars in it. It was thought to represent scales, or a balance, which more accurately describes the Latin term libra. That’s the reason it is often accompanied by the image of a pair of scales.
Another abbreviation of libra (£) is an ornate form of L with a cross-stroke (the way a medieval scribe marked an abbreviation.) This is also the symbol used for the English pound. The link between the the two senses of pound, weight and money, is that in England a thousand years ago a pound in money was equivalent to the value of a pound of silver.
It also occurs to me that we use the symbol “#” on our phones and refer to it as the pound sign or button — of course, we also use it to mean “number.”
Anyhow, I’ve decided that this will just remain a mystery to me… I just don’t get it — I’m with Kelly, it should mean labels. But I guess we’ll continue to buy our pumpkins by the lb.
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