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I'm a podiatry student and have a quick question that I can't easily find the answer to but figure someone here may know off the top of their head. Some people categorize monofilaments by the bending force with something like a 10 g monofilament bending against 10 g of force. Strictly speaking though grams is a unit of mass, not force, and saying bending against 10 g of mass doesn't make sense cause a mass itself cannot put pressure on something without acceleration, which would make it a force.

I'm assuming that people just did the conversion from lbs (which is a force) to mass using the acceleration of gravity so that maybe something like .022 lb of force would be equal to the 10 g—but that's just what I'm assuming. Can anybody clarify this odd mass/force/whatever classification?

I'm supposed to teach a workshop tomorrow to some underclassmen and their families and I was just thinking to myself how to clearly explain monofilament testing and then realized that everyone says that it bends against 10 grams of force, which physics-wise is just nonsense. And personally, I like to minimize the amount of nonsense that exits my mouth.

Thank you in advance.