People looked at yo mama and could immediately conceive of the opposite

How much water, by weight, is in an empty cup? Round to the nearest amount an average 17th century merchant could identify.

I guess in terms of an actual weightless object... Not... But if you have 2 equal weight items, call their combined weight 1 weight unit, take one away, that's half a weight unit, take two away, that's zero weight units.

The Rankine scale is generally measured in degrees. That's because it's defined in terms of the Fahrenheit scale, which is also measured in degrees. i.e. 1 Rankine degree = 1 Fahrenheit degree.

This is not the case for the Kelvin scale, which is defined directly in terms of thermal energy: 1 Kelvin ≈ 1.38*10^-23 J. Coincidentally (but not really of course) this amount of thermal energy is such that an increase of 1 Kelvin corresponds to 1 degree Celsius.

This is rather pedantic, as you could easily define Rankine in terms of thermal energy as well. Some people do this and don't say "degrees" in front of Rankine. Or, you could define the Kelvin in terms of the Celsius, and measure it in degrees.

tl:dr Rankine has degrees, but for mainly historical reasons.

P.S.: Kelvin actually also had degrees until 1968!

It does share a 0 with kelvin

And F and C share a -44

Not if it's an absolute scale, no. And then it does actually agree on what 0 is with Kelvin too.

I knew about the Fahrenheit and Celsius one as a kid (because the local weatherman pointed it out one winter) but I only looked up the Kelvin one a few years back.

It was invented by some scottish guy long before we had the means to measure things that would need it, and ever since that multibillion-dollar satellite thing fell to pieces even American scientists use metric units, we learn them in every grade level’s science class and our scientific community has this understandable atmosphere of regret that Congress was too lazy to completely kill off imperial units when they had the chance

The story I heard, and I don’t know if this is true or not, is that 100 isn’t just a human’s blood temperature, but specifically Mrs. Fahrenheit’s blood temperature.