Let me begin by saying, I have actually tried to stay out of this debate. Mostly due to the impression I’d gotten from it was that it was a stupid little question like, ‘which came first the chicken or the egg?’ You know, the kind of question that had no discernible answer.

Then I started listening to some of the arguments, and got a little heated myself. I wasn’t exactly sure of my stance. Given that both sides were convincing, I couldn’t decide which stance I wanted to take, or which one was truly right. I’m a person who likes to know things, I like to get answers, and I like to be right, so this has actually taken of a lot of my brain space lately, as I pondered the question.

(pondered as in agressively argued with myself)

I can see how people are so convinced one way or the other. On the negative side, you will hear some well thought out, scientific ideas about water molecules and the science of water.

It is thought that ‘wet’ is how water interacts with the world, meaning water cannot get ‘wet’ because it is water. I have heard the argument that says water molecules touch each other, therefore they are wet, but a water molecule is not, in itself, ‘wet’.

Water cannot be wet because it is water, that is the effect the negative side is trying to get across.

However, the positive side states that water is wet simply because it is a liquid. If you touch water, you get wet, meaning what you touched must have also been wet.

The science of their side is limited to Mr. Gary Hamann’s four basic rules of the science lab; fire is hot, round things roll, glass breaks, and …. Water is wet. Basic stuff here.

One of the occuring themes in this debate is that ‘wet’ is simply an adjective. ‘Wet’, being how we describe water, not an accurate description of what water truly is.

An adjective is a word the describes a noun, we all learned that from English class at some point, but the thing about adjectives is that it is how we describe our interactions with the world, like a table is hard.

We can all agree on that because if we were to punch it, our hands would hurt. However, the hardness of the table does not even measure on the Mohs Hardness scale which is used in the scientific community to measure ‘hardness’, therefore the table is not hard.

But it is.

The table is also brown. We can also agree on that, none of us are blind and can therefore obviously see that the table is some shade of brown.

But, the table is not, in fact, brown. We see brown only because it is a mix of the fragments of white light that reflect off of the surface rather than being absorbed upon it, we call that color.

Therefore, while it is a hard, brown table, it is neither brown, nor hard.

What I am really trying to say, is that this is not a debate over wetness. This is a debate of language and scientific understanding; and the discrepancy between the two.

Water is described solely by how we interact with, as is everything else in this world, therefore it is wet in the sense of the word as much as the table is brown.

On the contrary, water is not wet, as much as the table is not brown.

It is similar to how cold does not exist; but it is still cold outside, because that is how we interact with the slow moving molecules in the air. But cold does not exist.

My point is that water can be described either way, it is both wet and not wet. Both sides are right.

So, now that I’ve publicly taken my position on the debate, I have another question;
‘How many holes does a straw have, one or two?’

Thank you