Earlier today I was sitting in physics class. I was listening to the professor, a difficult task at times. He was making a graph on the board. He was explaining that the graph was going to start at 0 meters and go to 1 meter. And it struck me. Why is it that we say one meter, but zero meters? Obviously the single meter is not going to be plural. That doesn't make any sense at all. But why is the absence of a meter plural? Why is it that we say something like "I have one dog, but no cats." What an interesting feature of our language. I am not sure at all how this works in other languages, but what a confusing thing to have to learn about a language--that the possession of many of the same object as well as the absence of the object is said the same, and both in the plural. The only reason why this could be that I came up with is that when we have zero, it is the absence of any number of this particular object. Meaning that by having zero, we can't have one or two or three or seventeen. We can have zero cats or five dogs or nineteen meters or one book. Plurals... what a funny thing.
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