Prone vs Supine

I don't know about you but I used to think that these two words were synonyms. They are not. A person is prone when they lie on their stomach and supine when they lie on their back.

    Prone                                                          Photo: Daily Mail       

Supine                             Photo: Finger Lakes Runners Club

Learn a new word: tare

While searching for a digital weighing scale for my kitchen I came across the term tare, a word which I had never heard before. I looked it up on Macmillan online dictionary and this is what it said:

The weight of an empty truck or large container, used for calculating the weight of the goods that it carries.

And according to Collins dictionary:

1. The weight of the wrapping or container in which goods are packed.
2. A deduction from gross weight to compensate for this.

It can also be used as a transitive verb to mean to weigh (a package etc.) in order to calculate the amount of tare. 

So let us say that you are going to bake a cake and want to weigh baking powder on a digital weighing machine. The tare function will help you by deducting the weight of the container and arriving at the net weight of the baking powder in it.