this post was submitted on 15 May 2025
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I don't know who that Tom Fitton guy is, but water absolutely wet. And he's a knob.
Wetness is a quality/concept gained from a surface having liquid adhere to it. The liquid itself can't be wet. It's like saying fire is burnt.
Wetness is being saturated with water. Water is saturated by water by a base definition; you cannot be more saturated with something than literally being it, a 100% saturation value. Water is wet. And now so is the object in contact with it.
It's less consistent to the example to say that fire is burnt and transferring that burnt, and more that fire is hot and a material affected by fire is also hot. Fire is hot. And now so is the object in contact with it. Being burnt is a secondary reaction as a result of the primary transference of the heat properties in an overabundance. Much like your skin shriveling is a result of being wet for prolonged periods. It's a secondary reaction to the primary transferance of properties.
Water transfers its wetness, fire transfers its heat. Water is wet.
Unfortunately this is a flawed analogy.
What you're equating water wets water is that heat heats heat, which could make semantic sense, but is a useless statement. The same argument, made for other properties, also becomes ridiculous: "light brightens light", "scratching scratches the scratching", "aging ages time", etc.
Definitions are always imperfect, but some are imperfecter than others.
Also, see definition of henges; Stonehenge is not a henge, despite being the source of the word.
There's an argument that a single molecule of water on its own would not be wet, but essentially all water is touched by other water, so even by the needlessly contrarian definition, water is wet.
There’s an argument that wetness is a sensation that occurs when water comes into contact with a solid surface. Therefore, while water can make other things wet, it is not considered wet on its own.
I'd argue there exist extremely viscous liquids which would be considered wet when in contact with water.
It seems arbitrary to exclude liquids from being wet.
This is my personal argument tbh. Water transfers wetness but it can transfer it's wetness to other water.
You don't get to just say that it's not up for debate lmao every definition is up for debate
Water is wet, and the only definitions that explicitly exclude the possibility that it is are based entirely on the idea that water isn't wet, rather than the actual ways people use the word "wet"