Of Medals and Baseball

In raising our son, my wife and I try to take a zero-tolerance approach to mistakes. That doesn't mean we discourage mistakes, rather that we encourage pre-checking and require prompt fixing mistakes we discover.

I'd recently discovered that my Boston Marathon finisher's medal had summered in a jacket packet. This prompted my son to make an observation about the (near)homophones "medal" and "metal", he noted that while medals are often metal, they aren't always. My wife then pointed out another homophone in the set, but we were unsure of its spelling(s), we knew the word meant "to insinuate oneself in another's business." I thought it was "meddle", while my wife thought it was "mettle". By cracking open the dictionary, it turned out that I was correct, so we have "medal, metal, and meddle."

Over the weekend, I got corrected during a discussion of baseball. In a discussion of bat design, I cited that the kinetic energy of an object is mass times velocity squared, one of the men in the conversation corrected me, correctly noting it to be KE=½mv². While my mistake of doubling the energy wasn't pertinent to the discussion at hand, I was wrong and am glad he set me straight. (The discussion related to the cupping out of the business end of a bat, to permit it to be accelerated more rapidly, thus having more energy to transfer to the ball. The significant thing here is the fact that greater bat mass yields a linear change, but greater bat speed yields an exponential improvement.)