Not Even Newton's Word: Authority and Resistance in the Royal Society Corpus 1

Abstract This paper investigates the historical development of Isaac Newton's proposed distinction between mass and weight in the Principia Mathematica of 1687 and traces its fate in the scientific English of the Royal Society between 1700 and 1920. Prior to Newton's differentiation in the Principia, weight was a polysemous lemma encoding various meanings, one of which Newton lexicalised to mass. This created a precisely datable instance of deliberate semantic reform. The study asks how far this proposal spread through scientific writing and what patterns of usage appear in the texts that record its adoption or resistance. To assess this, the study uses diachronic frequency analysis, Conditional Inference Trees, and Random Forests to assess the relative influence of linguistic and extralinguistic factors on lexical choice. The results show that the distinction between mass and weight did not diffuse uniformly. Authorial practice, disciplinary subfield and the referent object emerge as the strongest predictors of usage. These findings shed light on the history of scientific vocabulary and on the dynamics of deliberate semantic innovation.