My wife just bought bathroom scales. The box says that they weigh up to 182kg. Clearly they don’t, because I can lift, hold and carry them easily. I estimate that they weigh less than a kilogram.
I’m being silly, of course, between different meanings of weigh. The scales weigh me, I weigh myself and I weigh ??kg.
I was caught between saying How much do the scales weigh? and How much does the scale weigh? In the olden days, scales definitely came in pairs, and I would normally have said scales here, except these are/this is battery operated with a digital readout and somehow seems less plural. In fact my wife bought two scales, one for us and one for our niece. I tried weighing one scale(s) on the other(s) but it didn’t work, so I can’t give you an exact weight.
Never Pure and Rarely Simple 