Page 20 - Physical chemistry understanding our chemical world

Etymological

introduction

The hero in The Name of the Rose is a medieval English monk. He acts as sleuth,
and is heard to note at one point in the story how, ‘The study of words is the
whole of knowledge’. While we might wish he had gone a little
further to mention chemicals, we would have to agree that many ‘‘Etymology’’ means
of our technical words can be traced back to Latin or Greek roots. the derivation of a
The remainder of them originate from the principal scientists who word’s meaning.
pioneered a particular field of study, known as etymology.
Etymology is our name for the science of words, and describes the sometimes-
tortuous route by which we inherit them from our ancestors. In fact, most words
change and shift their meaning with the years. A classic example describes how King
George III, when first he saw the rebuilt St Paul’s Cathedral in London, described it
as ‘amusing, artificial and awful’, by which he meant, respectively, it ‘pleased him’,
was ‘an artifice’ (i.e. grand) and was ‘awesome’ (i.e. breathtaking).
Any reader will soon discover the way this text has an unusual etymological empha-
sis: the etymologies are included in the belief that taking a word apart actually helps us
to understand it and related concepts. For example, as soon as we know the Greek for
‘green’ is chloros, we understand better the meanings of the proper nouns chlorophyll
and chlorine, both of which are green. Incidentally, phyll comes from the Greek for
‘leaf’, and ine indicates a substance.
Again, the etymology of the word oxygen incorporates much historical informa-
tion: oxys is the Greek for ‘sharp’, in the sense of an extreme sensory experience,
such as the taste of acidic vinegar, and the ending gen comes from gignesthaw (pro-
nounced ‘gin-es-thaw’), meaning ‘to be produced’. The classical roots of ‘oxygen’
reveal how the French scientists who first made the gas thought they had isolated the
distinguishing chemical component of acids.
The following tables are meant to indicate the power of this approach. There are
several dozen further examples in the text. The bibliography on p. 533 will enable
the interested reader to find more examples.