hafnium / celtium

1 × 2 × 3 cm chunk of hafnium

29 September 2023

Hafnium is a lustrous, silvery metal found in many zirconium ores. It has atomic number 72 and the symbol Hf. Its primary use is in the control rods of nuclear reactors, but it is also used in the manufacture of microprocessors.

The existence of hafnium was predicted in 1871 by Mendeleev’s periodic table, but the element was not discovered until Dirk Coster and George de Hevesy of Copenhagen’s Universitets Institut for Teoretisk Fysik identified it in 1922. Its existence was announced by Niels Bohr, Coster and Hevesy’s supervisor in the lab, in his 11 December 1922 Nobel lecture:

In these circumstances Dr. Coster and Prof. Hevesy, who are both for the time working in Copenhagen, took up a short time ago the problem of testing a preparation of zircon-bearing minerals by X-ray spectroscopic analysis. These investigators have been able to establish the existence in the minerals investigated of appreciable quantities of an element with atomic number 72, the chemical properties of which show a great similarity to those of zirconium and a decided difference from those of the rare-earths.

But the name hafnium was not proposed until Coster and Hevesy did so a few weeks later in a 20 January 1923 letter in the journal Nature:

For the new element we propose the name Hafnium (Hafniae = Copenhagen).

Hafnia is a modern Latin name for Copenhagen, a combination of the Danish havn (harbor) + the Latin suffix -ium.

The search for Mendeleev’s predicted element #72 kicked off a rather fierce debate in chemical circles, with many scientists scrambling to be the first to identify it. In 1911, Georges Urbain claimed to have identified the missing element, which he named celtium:

During repeated fractionation of the nitrates in the isolation of lutecium from gadolinite earths, a few drops of a mother liquor were obtained that did not crystallise. This contained a new oxide belonging to the rare earths and characterised by a magnetic susceptibility three or four times less than that of lutecia. The name celtium is given to the corresponding element, and the symbol Ct assigned to it.

Urbain’s supposed discovery was eventually proven incorrect, but not after considerable debate and in-fighting. This particular debate over the discovery of an element was especially significant because it marked a shift in methodology. Urbain had used traditional chemical methods in his search for the element, while Coster and Hevesy had used the new technique of x-ray spectroscopy, and their discovery marked a shift in elemental research away from chemistry and toward physics. Hafnium turned out to be the second-to-last stable element to be discovered.

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Sources:

Bohr, Niels. “The Structure of the Atom” (Nobel lecture), 11 December 1922, 42. Nobelprize.org.

Coster, D. and G. Hevesy. “On the Missing Element of Atomic Number 72” (2 January 1923). Nature, 111, 20 January 1923, 79/2. DOI: 10.1038/111079a0.

Fernelius, W. Conard. “Hafnium.” Journal of Chemical Education, 59.3, 1 March 1982, 242. DOI: 10.1021/ed059p242.

Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, hafnium, n.; third edition, March 2022, celtium, n.

Scerri, Eric. A Tale of Seven Scientists and a New Philosophy of Science. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2016, 208–209. ProQuest Ebook Central.

Urbain, Georges. “A New Element Accompanying Lutecium and Scandium in Gadolinite Earths: Celtium.” Journal of the Chemical Society, 100.2, 1911, 115. Archive.org.

Photo credit: Chemical Elements: A Virtual Museum, 2009. Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.

geek

27 September 2023

Geek is a general term of opprobrium that has, over the centuries, developed some specialized senses. And while it is generally negative, in some contexts it has been reclaimed as a proud marker of identity.

The word dates to the sixteenth century when it had the sense of a fool or simpleton. It was generally spelled geck, with variations being common. We see it Alexander Barclay’s 1530 Ecloges:

And he is a fole / a sot and a geke also
Whiche choseth a place / vnto the same to go
And where dyuers ways / lead thether dyrectly
He chosed the worst / and moost of Jeopardy

Shakespeare uses the word in two of his plays. In Twelfth Night, composed c.1601 and first published in the 1623 First Folio, the character of Malvolio, a servant, uses it in speaking to Olivia, his mistress:

Why haue you suffer’d me to be imprison’d,
Kept in a darke house, visited by the Priest,
And made the most notorious gecke and gull
That ere inuention plaid on? Tell me why?

And in Cymbelene, which was first staged no later than 1611 and again first published in the First Folio, the ghost of Sicilius Leonatus uses the word in speaking to Posthumus, his son:

Why did you suffer Iachimo, slight thing of Italy, To taint his nobler hart & brain, with needlesse ielousy, And to become the geeke and scorne o’th’others vilany?

This general sense of a worthless or despised individual persisted through the nineteenth century. And in the latter half of that century geek starts appearing in American slang. The Oxford English Dictionary treats the British geck and the American geek as distinct words, presumably because of the difference in pronunciation, with geek being a variant on the older word. Geck being pronounced /ɡɛk/, and geek being pronounced /ɡik/. In recent decades, the American pronunciation of geek has recrossed the Atlantic to colonize the mother country.

In the early twentieth century, the American term developed a specific meaning in the carnival or circus world, that of a performer who would eat live animals or do other repellant or painful things on stage—or more usually feign doing so. The earliest use of this specialized sense that I’m aware of is in an advertisement in the entertainment newspaper Billboard of 18 May 1918:

WANTED FOR THE GREAT WORTHAM CIRCUS SIDE SHOW

Strong Freak or Attraction for a single Pit or Platform Show, either on salary or per cent. No salary too high or no attraction too strong. Ten big fairs to get the money at. I want a real Geek, man or woman, for my Snake Show.

A 1931 American Speech glossary of circus and carnival slang gives a putative origin for this particular sense:

geek, n. A freak, usually a fake, who is one of the attractions in a pit-show. The word is reputed to have originated with a man named Wagner of Charleston, W. Va., whose hideous snake-eating act made him famous. Old timers still remember his ballyhoo, part of which ran:

“Come and see Esau
Sittin’ on a see-saw
Eatin’ ’em raw!”

Wagner’s act certainly helped popularize this sense of the word, but whether or not he was the origin is anyone’s guess.

Note, that geek’s general use to refer to someone deserving of opprobrium continued to be the more common sense of the word; the carnival sense did not replace it. And another specialized sense, more common than the carnival sense at the time but less well known today, is that of a weak man, especially one prone to various ailments or even hypochondria. Here is an example from a newspaper article on hemorrhoids that appeared in the Colorado Springs Gazette of 2 January 1920:

When the inflammation subsides, as it does in a few days, as a rule, the pile still remains, of course, altho [sic] many a poor geek at this time gives a testimonial to the effect that whatever treatment he used has “cured” his piles—and by the time his next attack comes the testimonial is embalmed in indelible printer’s ink.

This sub-sense of a weak and sickly man continued well into the 1950s, often in the phrase poor geek. And it is probably from this sub-sense that the sense of an overly bookish, non-athletically inclined student developed. Both the Oxford English Dictionary and Green’s Dictionary of Slang list the first use of this studious sense as being by writer Jack Kerouac in a 1 October 1957 letter to Allen Ginsberg:

Unbelievable number of events almost impossible to remember, including earlier big Viking Press hotel room with thousands of screaming interviewers and Road roll original 100 miles of ms. rolled out on carpet, bottles of Old Granddad, big articles in Sat. Review, in World Telly, everyfuckingwhere, everybody mad, Brooklyn College wanted me to lecture to eager students and big geek questions to answer.

But as one can see from the context, the meaning of Kerouac’s geek isn’t clear. Additionally, his use here would be a very early example. The use of geek to mean a studious student would not become common until the 1980s. Kerouac could have meant questions from studious Brooklyn College students, or he could have just meant that he had to answer a lot of foolish questions from all sorts of people.

Early use of the studious sense was often in the slang of Black youth, before it transferred over to university slang in general. For instance, we have this entry in a glossary of Black teen slang in Edith Folb’s 1980 Runnin’ Down Some Lines:

geek 1. Weird, unusual, or different person. 2. Studious person.

And with the advent of the personal computer in the early 1980s, the studious sense of geek became attached to the world of high-tech. A user posted the following to the Usenet group net.misc on 16 February 1983:

I eschew the use of “foo” “bar” and other dill-beak geek dull unimaginative temporary filenames!

And Eric Raymond’s 1991 New Hacker’s Dictionary included this entry:

computer geek, n. One who eats (computer) bugs for a living. One who fulfills all the dreariest negative stereotypes about hackers: an asocial, malodorous, pasty-faced monomaniac with all the personality of a cheese grater. Cannot be used by outsiders without implied insult to all hackers; compare black-on-black usage of ‘n[——]r’. A computer geek may be either a fundamentally clueless individual or a proto-hacker in larval stage. Also called turbo nerd, turbo geek.

Despite Raymond’s allusion to the carnival sense of geek, there is no reason to think that the tech (or any other) sense of geek derives from the carnival one. Rather the various specialized senses all developed independently from the general term of opprobrium.

As seen in these last two quotations, the tech sense started out as a negative one. But by the late 1990s geek would be reclaimed and used proudly by computer engineers, coders, and other technical specialists.

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Sources:

Advertisement. The Billboard, 18 May 1918, 29. ProQuest Magazine.

Barclay, Alexander. Ecloges. London: P. Treveris, 1530, sig. Ciii-v. Early English Books Online (EEBO).

Brady, William. “Health Talks.” Colorado Springs Gazette, 2 January 1920, 4/6. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

Folb, Edith A. Runnin’ Down Some Lines: The Language and Culture of Black Teenagers. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard UP, 1980, 239. Archive.org.

Green’s Dictionary of Slang, 2023, s.v. geek, n.1.

Kerouac, Jack. Selected Letters: 1957–1969. Ann Charters, ed. New York: Viking, 1999, 66.

Maurer, David W. “A Glossary of Circus and Carnival Slang.” American Speech, 6.5, June 1931, 327–337 at 331. JSTOR.

Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, s.v. geck, n.1.; third edition, March 2003, s.v. geek, n.

Raymond, Eric S. The New Hacker’s Dictionary. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1991, 102. Archive.org.

Shakespeare, William. Cymbelene. In Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies. London: Isaac Jaggard and Edward Blount, 1623, 5.4, 393–93. Folger Shakespeare Library.

———. Twelfth Night. In Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies. London: Isaac Jaggard and Edward Blount, 1623, 5.1, 275/1. Folger Shakespeare Library.

Photo credit: Charles Hutchins, 2007. Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.

metamour

2018 Pride parade in London

25 September 2023

Metamour is a word that has yet to make it into any major dictionary. It is, perhaps, best defined by Janet Hardy and Dossie Easton in their book The Ethical Slut:

Metamour Relationships

The word metamour is a recent coinage to describe your relationship with your lover’s lovers, and theirs with you. Beting a metamour brings up points of etiquette that Emily Post never dreamed of.

The word is a combination of meta- (above, beyond) + amour (French: lover).

The earliest use of the word that I have found is in the Urbandictionary, which in an entry from 19 July 2004 defines it thusly:

In a polyamorous relationship, where your lover has more than one lover, a metamour is the name given to your partner's other lover(s).

My partner and I went to see her metamour Jane at the weekend.

The earliest use of metamour I have found in print is from London’s the Independent of 4 April 2005 in an article on the growing (or at least becoming more open) phenomenon of polyamory in Britain:

Metamour Used to describe your relationship with one of your partner's partners

I did, however, discover a nonce use of metamour in a different sense in one of William Safire’s “On Language” columns for the New York Times. From 12 September 1982:

In passing, I derogated the supposed need for new words to cover highly specialized relationships, shrugging off the query from a reader who wanted to know what to call “an ex-wife with whom one was having an affair.” However, since most of the mail came in with suggestions for that query and not mine, let me pass them along:

“Because I am having an affair with my ex-husband,” writes an Arizona woman—how did I get involved in this?—“I have three suggestions”: conjugate, as a noun, is one; the others, interspersed with embarrassing and unnecessary confidences, are Paramate and metamour.

Other readers of Safire’s column suggested amorex, marry-go-round, mistrex (referring to an ex-wife with whom was sleeping), exspousal, and spousetress/spouster.

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Sources:

Frith, Maxine. “‘Ethical Sluts’ Develop New Language of Love for Open Relationships.” Independent (London), 4 April 2005, 16–17. ProQuest Newspapers.

Hardy, Janet W. and Dossie Easton. The Ethical Slut, third edition. Berkeley: Ten Speed Press, 2017, 204. Archive.org. (The word does not appear in earlier editions of the book.)

Safire, William. “On Language: The Bloopie Awards.” New York Times Magazine, 12 September 1982, 16. Nytimes.com.

Urbandictionary.com, 19 July 2004, s.v. metamour.

Image credit: Camerawalker, 2018. Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.

germanium

A 12-gram chunk of germanium, 2–3 cm in size

22 September 2023

Germanium is a hard-brittle, grayish-white metalloid with the atomic number 32 and the symbol Ge. The element has a large number of industrial uses, including use as a semiconductor in transistors and in fiber-optics, solar cells, and light-emitting diodes (LEDs).

It was discovered by chemist Clemens Winkler in 1885, who published his findings in early 1886, dubbing the new element after his homeland of Germany:

Nach mehrwöchentlichem mübevollem Suchen kann ich heute mit Bestimmtheit aussprechen, dass der Argyrodit ein neues, dem Antimon sehr ähnliches, aber von diesem doch scbarf unterschiedenes Element enthält, welchem der Name “Germanium” beigelegt werden möge.

(After several weeks of exhausting searching, I can now say with certainty that argyrodite contains a new element that is very similar to antimony, but differs sharply from it, to which the name “germanium” may be ascribed.)

The existence of germanium had been predicted by Dmitri Mendeleev and his periodic table. Mendeleev had provisionally dubbed the prospective element eka-silicon. (See eka-)

Winkler had initially wanted to dub his discovery neptunium, after the newly discovered planet, but that name had already been taken by a supposed element discovered by another German chemist, R. Hermann. Hermann’s discovery later proved to be mistaken.

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Sources:

Fontani, Marco, Mariagrazia Costa, and Mary Virginia Orna. The Lost Elements: The Periodic Table’s Shadow Side. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2015, 131. ProQuest Ebook Central.

Miśkowiec, Pawel. “Name Game: The Naming History of the Chemical Elements: Part 2—Turbulent Nineteenth Century.” Foundations of Chemistry, 8 December 2022. DOI: 10.1007/s10698-022-09451-w.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, March 2012, s.v. germanium, n.; September 2003, neptunium, n.

Winkler, Clemens. “Germanium, Ge, ein Neues, Nicht-Metallisches Element” (6 February 1886). Berichte der Deutschen chemischen Gesellschaft zu Berlin, vol. 19.1 (January–June 1886), 210–11 at 210. Bibliothèque Nationale de France: Gallica.

Image credit: Chemical Elements: A Virtual Museum, 2009. Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license.

ditto

Screenshot from the movie Fast Times at Ridgemont High (1982)

20 September 2023

Growing up in the United States in the 1970s, dittos were a staple of my educational experience. Ditto was the proprietary name of a type of spirit duplicator that produced purple-colored copies of a printed page. Dittos had a distinctive, pleasant odor, and it was something of a ritual to smell the sheets of paper that the teacher handed out. But why the name?

Ditto is an early seventeenth-century borrowing from Italian, which in turn is from the Latin dictus, meaning said. The word appears in John Florio’s 1598 Italian-English dictionary, A Worlde of Wordes:

Ditto, sayd, spoken, told. Also a speech or a saying.

Florio, however, is recording the Italian usage, not an English one.

We first see ditto in English writing early in the seventeenth century. It is first used as a substitute for the name of a month that had been previously mentioned. Here is an example from the 1625 collection of travel narratives, Purchas His Pilgrimes:

In the morning at breake of day (to our great admiration) wee saw land to the Westward, bearing North by West fiue leagues off, not once looking for any that way, but to the Eastward for Iuan de noua, which we made account could not be aboue sixe leagues South from vs, and being be-calmed, did doubt least the Current would set vs vpon it in the night: but the day clearing, we found it to be the Northermost Iland of the Angoxas, whence we departed the one and twentieth, ditto in the afternoone, which so amazed our Marriners, as that they were discouraged of getting our Voyage this way.

This usage was quickly adopted for things other than dates and frequently appears to this day in lists and inventories. We can see ditto in prose, referring to a previously mentioned thing, in a sermon on death by Ninian Campbell that was published in 1635:

That sun which ye see setting over your heads, the ebbing and flowing of the sea, which environeth us, that earth whereupon we walk, lately renewed, now growing old; and to come nearer, these graves whereupon yee trode in your entrie, this Church-yard, these through stones, that dead bell, that beir, that dolefull convoy, these two corps, and that wide opened sepulchre, telleth us, that we must die. And as Catullus saith,

—Ostentant omnia lethum. [They all signify death.]

Death is painted with the net of a fowler: and with this ditto, Devoro omnes, I devoure all. All things above us, beneath us, about us, within us, and without us, tell us that we must die.

And in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, ditto was used to refer to style of clothing in which all the articles of apparel were of the same color. Here the word used in the London newspaper the Connoisseur of 14 July 1755 saying that suits of ditto were commonly worn by physicians:

We may learn the disposition of a man by his apparel, as we know the trade of a carpenter by his leathern apron, or a soldier by his red coat. When we see a snuff-coloured suit of ditto with the bolus buttons, a metal headed cane, and an enormous bushy grizzle, we as readily know the wearer to be a dispenser of life and death, as if we had seen him pounding a mortar or brandishing a clyster-pipe.

And we see ditto used as a verb, meaning to repeat or echo what someone else has said, in the early nineteenth century. From the Albion (New York) of 28 February 1824:

Mr. Wilson asserted that so far from entertaining any improper intentions towards Mrs. Poolman, he really wouldn’t touch her with a pair of tongs—for she was a scold; and it was solely because she was an arrant scold that he told her husband he pitied him; and as to the kicking, he had threatened only if she should ever enter his apartments again. Mr. Lees, the landlord, dittoed Mr. Wilson’s statement as to Mrs. Poolman’s scolding faculty—she had a tongue enough, he said, to set a whole parish by the ears, and he heartily wished his house was rid of her.

And the trademarked Ditto machine from my childhood is first recorded in 1919. From a classified advertisement in Omaha, Nebraska’s Sunday World-Herald of 19 October 1919:

Ditto Duplicator

New machine, but can be purchased for great deal less than list price. J. E. Beckman. Doug. 346.

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Sources:

Advertisement. Sunday World-Herald (Omaha, Nebraska), 19 October 1919, Want Ads 5/3. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

Campbell, Ninian. A Treatise upon Death First Publickly Delivered in a Funerall Sermon, Anno Dom. 1630. Edinburgh: R. Young for I. Wilson, 1635, sig. C2r–v. Early English Books Online (EEBO).

Florio, John. A Worlde of Wordes. London: Arnold Hatfield for Edward Blount, 1598, 110. Early English Books Online (EEBO).

Green’s Dictionary of Slang, 2023, s.v. ditto, n.

Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, s.v. ditto, n.; third edition, September 2022, s.v. ditto, v.

“Police. Bow Street. Virtue in Danger.” Albion, or British, Colonial, and Foreign Weekly Gazette (New York), 28 February 1824, 292/1–2. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

Purchas, Samuel. Purchas His Pilgrimes in Five Books. London: William Stansby for Henrie Fetherstone, 1625, 335–36. Early English Books Online (EEBO).

Tierney, Grace. “The Many Uses and History of Ditto.” Wordfoolery (blog), 29 May 2023.

Trim, Eutrapelus. The Connoisseur (London), 14 July 1755, 460. Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO).

Image credit: Fast Times at Ridgemont High, Amy Heckerling dir., Universal Pictures, 1982. Fair use of a single low-resolution screenshot from the film to illustrate the topic under discussion.