Scruples

I was writing about a couple of old advertisements yesterday, and in researching the company behind them I came across a reference to scruples, not as a sense of moral misgiving, but as an apothecaries’ weight. It amused me until there was a little tickle in the back of my mind that I might actually have known about scruples and weights.

I looked it up and discovered that in the apothecaries’ system, a scruple is equal to 20 grains; a scruple is also or one-third of a dram and is equivalent to 1.296 grams.

The word comes from the Latin for a little stone; it must have been a teeny-weeny stone! It was a unit of commercial weight used by the Romans and was also a unit of coinage weight. For Greek merchants, the weight of one silver drachma (dram, drachm) was three scruples.

So…

60 grains – 1 dram
20 grains – 1 scruple
1 dram – 1/8 troy ounce
I think I have that right, but it’s a bit confusing!

Scruple meaning a moral misgiving, however, also comes from the same Latin word, but with a different meaning, being uneasy and anxious and conscience-stricken – you certainly would be uneasy if you had a small stone in your shoe and that is probably where it arose from the writings of Cicero.

A third meaning is as a measure of time in Hebrew culture; the hour apparently is divided into 1080 scruples! I guess that was in very ancient times, adopted from the Babylonians; they divided the days of sunlight (from sunrise to sunset) into hours, parts and moments. A day (whether it was summer or winter) always had twenty-four hours; each hour had 1080 parts, and each part had 76 moments… I can’t imagine that the every-day people bothered much with that, too busy working and looking after their families I should think!

My featured picture is of some small stones… and some lichen