this post was submitted on 15 May 2025
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Solid (frozen) water, commonly referred to as "ice," can have a surface.
is ice wet?
It can be, but the ice itself is not wet.
By your bizarre definition, yes.
"Wet" Is used as an adjective describing something that consists of or is touching some liquid. Nobody seems to have a problem with the concept of wet paint. I can't imagine anyone other than Sheldon Cooper saying "technically the wall is wet, the paint is liquid!" If you would say that, I have a locker to shove you in
Sure. I wouldn't usually refer to lava as wet, but I also don't interact with it very often. Glass is an amorphous solid, so not liquid and so not wet unless it's touching something liquid or is liquid itself. Liquid mercury exists outside of thermometers as well, and it's wet both in one and out of one. Space isn't a thing, and so it you can't be in contact with anything, and so concepts like wetness and dryness don't really apply.
I also wouldn't call any of those wet in my daily life, largely because I don't interact with them very often. I don't get into hyper pedantic arguments about the ways we define words very often in real life either. Most people simply agree that water is wet
Another note (which you mentioning air made me think of), if water "has no surface" then how does it have "surface tension?" Another point for "water touches water."
Yes.
It dissolves when wet, sure, but on a molecular level is the cocoa bonding with the water to become some state other than "wet" or "dry," or is the dissolved cocoa still "wet?"
Matter of fact, we have words to describe the quantity of "wetness." There's many synonyms of course, soaked, dessicated, etc, but the base levels are: dry, damp, and wet. If "water is not wet," then what is it? Do you propose water to be "dry?"
It's not "less than meaningful" if you understand wet as a relative term. There can be a normal level of wetness where if it is exceeded we then call that thing wet, and if it's under that threshold we call it dry relative to the norm.
If you somehow came from a perfectly dry environment, yeah, you would probably consider our world pretty wet. You would have a pretty hard time describing your experience to others if you couldn't use the word wet to do so. The word doesn't lose meaning just because you go all reductio ad adsurdum with it.
https://feddit.uk/comment/17348047
That's the actual definition. That's why bad solder joints are called dry joints and melting the solder across a soldering iron tip is called wetting the tip.