mercury / quicksilver

Elemental mercury

9 February 2024

Mercury is a chemical element with atomic number 80 and the symbol Hg. It is the only metallic element that is liquid at standard temperature and pressure. (Elemental bromine is also a liquid, but not a metal.) Mercury has a wide variety of uses, ranging from thermometers to fluorescent lighting and dental amalgams, but many of these uses are being replaced by other substances because of the element’s high toxicity. The chemical symbol for mercury is Hg, from the Latin hydrargyrum, which in turn comes from the Greek ύδράργυρος (hydrargyros), or literally liquid silver.

Mercury has been known since antiquity, but the name does not appear in English until the fourteenth century. The older English name for the metal is quicksilver, which dates to the Old English period. It’s found in a mid tenth-century medical text known as Bald’s Leechbook:

Wiþ magan wærce, rudan sæd & cwic seolfor & eced bergen on neaht nestig. Eft gnid on eced & on wæter polleian sele ðrincan sona Þ[æt] sar toglit.

(For strong pain, taste rue seed & quicksilver & vinegar on a fasting night. Afterward, mix pennyroyal herb into vinegar and into water and give to drink; soon that pain glides away.)

The quick in quicksilver is from the older sense of that word meaning alive, having the properties, especially movement and agility, of a living thing. Since mercury is a liquid at room temperature, the movement of drops of the metal gives it the semblance of a something that is alive.

In antiquity and in the Middle Ages, seven of the elemental metals were each associated with a god and with a planet, with mercury associated, of course, with the messenger god and the planet of the same name. We see this association in a variety of alchemical writings, including Chaucer’s The Canon’s Yeoman’s Tale, one of the earliest appearances of the name mercury in English. Note that Chaucer makes a distinction between the Latinate mercury and the English quicksilver:

I wol yow telle, as was me taught also,
The foure spirites and the bodies sevene,
By ordre, as ofte I herde my lord hem nevene.

The firste spirit quyksilver called is,
The seconde orpyment, the thridde, ywis,
Sal armonyak, and the ferthe brymstoon.
The bodyes sevene eek, lo, hem heere anoon:
Sol gold is, and Luna silver we threpe,
Mars iren, Mercurie quyksilver we clepe,
Saturnus leed, and Juppiter is tyn,
And Venus coper, by my fader kyn!

(I will tell you, as it was taught also to me,
The four spirits and the seven metals,
In the order as I often heard my lord name them.

The first spirit is called quicksilver,
The second orpiment, the third, indeed,
Sal ammoniac, and the fourth brimstone.
The seven metals also, lo, hear them now:
The Sun is gold, and the Moon we assert silver,
Mars iron, Mercury we call quicksilver,
Saturn lead, and Jupiter is tin,
And Venus copper, by my father’s kin!)

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Sources:

Chaucer, Geoffrey. “The Canon’s Yeoman’s Tale.” The Canterbury Tales. In Larry D. Benson, ed. The Riverside Chaucer, 8.819–29, 273. Also, with minor variation in wording, at Harvard’s Geoffrey Chaucer Website.

Cockayne, Oswald. Leechdoms, Wortcunning, and Starcraft of Early England, vol. 2 of 3. London: Longmans, et al., 1865, 356–57. London, British Library, Royal 12, D xvii. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Miśkowiec, Pawel. “Name Game: The Naming History of the Chemcial Elements—Part 1—from Antiquity till the End of 18th Century.” Foundations of Chemistry, 1 November 2022. DOI: 10.1007/s10698-022-09448-5.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, September 2001, s.v. mercury, n.; December 2007, quicksilver, n.

Photo credit: Bionerd, 2008. Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license.

bowl / Super Bowl

NRG Stadium in Houston, Texas just prior to the playing of Super Bowl LI on 5 February 2017

7 February 2024

With every new year comes the onslaught of bowl games: the Sugar Bowl, the Cotton Bowl, the Rose Bowl, the Fiesta Bowl, the Aloha Bowl, and of course the Super Bowl. Why do we call these gridiron football contests bowls?

The word bowl is an old one, and the most basic meaning of the word has remained unchanged for over a millennium. A bowl is a round vessel for liquids that is wider than it is deep. The word can be found in Old English, such as this example from Ælfric’s Life of St. George, written in the late tenth century:

Athanasius ða ardlice genam ænne mycelne bollan mid bealuwe afylled and deoflum betæhte ðone drenc ealne and sealde him drincan, ac hit him ne derode.

(Athanasius then eagerly took a large bowl filled with poison and dedicated all that drink to the devils and gave it to him to drink, but it did not harm him.)

But what does this have to do with gridiron football?

Bowls are associated with sports because modern stadiums are shaped like bowls. The earliest use of bowl in reference to a stadium that I’m aware of is in the 14 November 1903 issue of the Boston Globe. The article refers to the newly built Harvard stadium:

Although the "bowl" of the stadium for the most part is now covered with temporary wooden seats, the company which has been constructing the stadium has placed more than 10 rows of concrete seats on the iron stringers above the number expected.

Because of their shape, stadiums are often given names that include bowl in the title. The first of these was the Yale Bowl, construction of which began in 1913 and was completed the following year. The name Yale Bowl appears in the Yale Alumni Weekly of 4 April 1913:

THE YALE BOWL

This proposed structure has been called the “Bowl” and rightly so. It is to be half below ground and half above; and the upper half is to be built upon a bank constructed from the excavation from the lower half. The whole building is to be in the form of an ellipse, of concrete, with wooden seats resting upon the concrete.

The Yale Bowl inspired the building of the Rose Bowl in Pasadena, California in 1922 to host the Tournament of Roses football game, which had been first held on 1 January 1902. An early use of the name Rose Bowl is from the 14 November 1922 Los Angeles Times:

An observer of the game between California and U.S.C. at the opening of the new rose bowl, writing for the Berkeley paper, seems to discern just enough good points about this mammoth structure amid surroundings of unsurpassed beauty to damn it with faint praise.

The game inspired other ones, which about a decade later were being referred to as bowl games. From the 29 December 1935 New York Times:

Dorais suggested that a committee be formed to investigate the bowl games to determine whether they are “healthy appendages or cancerous growths.” There was no action taken on this suggestion.

Bowl games are, with one exception, played between university teams. The exception is the Super Bowl, the championship game of professional American football. In the late 1960s, there were two competing football leagues, the American Football League (AFL) and the National Football League (NFL). (In 1970, the leagues would merge into a single NFL, with two conferences, the AFC and NFC.) In 1966 it was decided that the champions of each league should play each other, and the first AFL-NFL World Championship Game was played on 15 January 1967, in which the NFL’s Green Bay Packers defeated the AFL’s Kansas City Chiefs. But the game was popularly dubbed the Super Bowl.

The name was coined by AFL co-founder Lamar Hunt, who was quoted in the 18 July 1966 New York Daily News as saying:

I think one of the first things we’ll consider is the date of the Super Bowl—that’s my term for the championship game between the two leagues. I’m in favor of playing it on a neutral site where we would be assured of good weather.

Hunt did not particularly like his coinage and never intended the name Super Bowl to be official. But the name caught on anyway, and in 1970 the newly merged league made the name official. An Associated Press report of 7 January 1970 records:

The man who gave the name to football’s greatest attraction sheepishly admitted yesterday that that he isn’t particular proud of his feat.

“I guess it is a little corny,” said Lamar Hunt, millionaire owner of the Kansas City Chiefs. “But it looks like we’re stuck with it.”

[…]

“I don’t know how I came up with it. It think it must be related to a ball that was popular with kids at the time. It was called super ball. It was tightly wound and very live. You could bounce it all over a house.

“My two kids—Lamar Jr., 10, and Sharon, 8—loved the ball. They played with it all the time. “[sic]So we got Super Bowl from super ball. Kinda silly, isn’t it. I’m not proud of it. But nobody’s come up with anything better.”

This last bit about the super ball must be treated with skepticism. After the fact explanations of a term’s origin, even by the coiner of an expression, are very often inaccurate. Other sources have often taken this explanation as gospel, even though Hunt, when he gave this explanation, said he was unsure about what inspired the name.

The more likely explanation is the prosaic one. Bowl was a well-established football term referring to a championship game between college teams, and the professional championship would presumably be at a higher, or super, level.

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Sources:

Clayton, Mary and Janet Mullins. “Saint George.” Old English Lives of Saints, Volume 2, Ælfric. Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library 59. Harvard University Press, 2019, 57.

Daggett, David. “The ‘Bowl.’” Yale Alumni Weekly, 22.29, 4 April 1913, 727–28 at 727. HathiTrust Digital Archive. https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=iau.31858045561119&seq=749

Dictionary of Old English: A to I, 2018, s. v. bolla, bolle.

Grimsley, Will (Associated Press). “Sports Angles.” Asbury Park Press (New Jersey), 7 January 1970, 47. ProQuest Historical Newspapers.

Kelley, Robert F. “Inquiry by Coaches Asked on Post-Season Contests.” New York Times, 29 December 1935, Sports 9/2. ProQuest Historical Newspapers.

Mullins, Bill. “Re: Antedating of ‘Bowl’ (Football Stadium),” ADS-L, 17 December 2023.

“NFL-AFL Tilt to Rose Bowl?” (16 July 1966). Daily News (New York), 28C. ProQuest Historical Newspapers.

“On the New Grounds.” Boston Globe, 14 November 1903, 9/4. Newspapers.com.

Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, s. v. bowl, n.1.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, Nov. 2010, s. v. Rose Bowl, n.2.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, Jun. 2012, s. v. Super Bowl, n.

Shapiro, Fred. “Antedating of ‘Bowl’ (Football Stadium),” ADS-L, 16 December 2023.

———. “Slight Antedating of ‘Super Bowl.’” ADS-L, 13 January 2020.

Williams, Harry A. “Sport Shrapnel.” Los Angeles Times, 14 November 1922, 3.2/5. ProQuest Historical Newspapers.

Photo credit: Voice of America, 2017. Wikimedia Commons. Public domain image.

America

5 February 2024

Detail of Martin Waldseemüller’s 1507 map bestowing the name “America” on what is now known as South America

The continents of North and South America are named for Amerigo Vespucci (1451–1512). Vespucci made at least two voyages to the New World, one in 1499–1500 and another in 1501–02. He is alleged to have made two others, one before and one after the known voyages, but evidence for his participation in those expeditions is lacking. In a letter dated 4 September 1504, published the following year, Vespucci was the first to claim that new continents had been discovered, and in the letter he coined the term Mundus Novus (New World). The published letter was widely read throughout Europe.

While Vespucci, or any other European for that matter, cannot be truly said to have “discovered” America (after all, the Indigenous people of the land were already there), he was the first European to have recognized the significance of Columbus’s “discovery.” So the naming of the continents after him is apt.

Cartographer Martin Waldseemüller was the first to apply the name America to the New World, specifically to what is now the continent of South America on the world map that accompanied his 1507 Cosmographiae introduction (Introduction to Cosmography). In that book Waldseemüller, or more likely his collaborator Matthias Ringmann, justified the name and feminine form of America:

Nuc vo & he partes sunt latius lustratae /& alia quarta pars per Americu[m] Vesputiu[m] (ut in seqentibus audietur) inuenta est/qua non video cur quis iure vetet ab Americo inuentore sagacis ingenn viro Amerigen quasi Americi terra[m] / siue Americam dicenda[m]:cu & Europa & Asia a mulieribus sua for tita sint nomina.

(Now, these parts of the earth have been more extensively explored and a fourth part has been discovered by Amerigo Vespucci (as will be set forth in the following). Whereas both Europe and Asia received their names from women, I see no reason why anyone should justly object to calling this part America, as the land of Amerigo, after Amerigo, its discoverer, a man of great ability.)

Geradus Mercator was the first to apply the name America to what is now known as North America.

The name was in English usage by 1520, as evidenced by John Rastell’s poem A New Interlude of the year:

This sayde north p[ar]te is callyd europa
And this south p[ar]te callyd affrica
This eest p[ar]te is callyd ynde
But this newe land [i]s founde lately
Ben callyd america by cause only
Americus dyd furst them fynde.

The naming of America after Vespucci is widely accepted, but that has not stopped others from claiming alternative origins. These, however, uniformly lack any solid evidence.

There is a claim, promulgated in the twentieth century, that America is actually named after a fifteenth-century Bristol merchant named Richard Ameryk, who had some tenuous and vague connection with Cabot’s voyages of exploration (exactly what role he played is not known, but it was probably minor and connected with financing the voyages). While Ameryk did exist, the only evidence connecting him to the New World is a copy of the fifteenth century manuscript that says the continent was named for him. But the original manuscript was destroyed in an 1860 fire, and the passage in the copy is almost certainly a nineteenth-century interpolation. Fisherman from Bristol and other English ports did fish on the Grand Banks in the fifteenth century, prior to Columbus’s voyage, and it is plausible, and even likely, that they set up temporary camps on the coast of North America, but there is no evidence of them naming the place or otherwise recognizing it as a significant discovery.

Another alternative origin, more plausible than the Ameryk one but still lacking evidence, is that the name America derives from the Amerrisque mountain range in Nicaragua. This hypothesis has been circulating since the late nineteenth century. Amerrisque translates to “country of the wind” in Mayan, and the range is probably named for an Indigenous tribe of that name who once lived in the region. But no evidence from the fifteenth or sixteenth centuries of the existence of the name of the range, and the name could come from America, rather than vice versa, or the form of the name may have been altered under the influence of the term America. Any similarity between the Mayan name and America is almost certainly coincidence. The probability that some Indigenous term somewhere would resemble America is close to 100 percent, and this one would seem to be it.

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Sources:

Everett-Heath, John. Concise Oxford Dictionary of World Place Names, sixth ed. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2020, s.v. America. Oxfordreference.com.

Hurlbut, George C. “The Origin of the Name ‘America.’” Journal of the American Geographical Society of New York, 20, 1888, 183–96. JSTOR. DOI: 10.2307/196759.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, June 2002, s.v. America, n., American, n. and adj.; September 2003, s.v. New World, n. and adj.

Rastell, John. A New Iuterlude. London: 1520, sig. C.iii. Early English Books Online (EEBO).

Waldseemüller, Martin. Cosmographiae introductio. Joseph Fischer, Franz von Wieser and Charles George Herbermann, eds. New York: United States Catholic Historical Society, 1907, 30. Gale Primary Sources: Sabin Americana.

Image credit: Waldseemüller, Martin. Universalis cosmographia secundum Ptholomaei traditionem et Americi Vespucii aliorumque lustrationes. Strasbourg, France?: 1507. Library of Congress. Public domain image.

manganese

Manganese nodules on the sea floor

2 February 2024

Beginning chemistry students frequently confuse manganese and magnesium, but the confusion is nothing new. The two were routinely conflated by even the best chemists until the late eighteenth century.

Manganese is a chemical element with atomic number 25 and the symbol Mn. It is a hard, brittle, silvery metal with a wide range of uses, notably in making steel alloys and in glassmaking. It was first isolated in the 1770s.

Like magnesium, the name manganese probably comes from the name of the Greek province Μαγνησία (Magnesia), although the form is difficult to explain etymologically and not all accept it as correct. Manganese first appears in Middle French in the late sixteenth century as a name for a manganese oxide ore, black manganese, used in glass making.

John Florio’s 1598 Italian-English dictionary, A Worlde of Wordes, records the Italian use of the name:

Manganese, a stuffe or stone to make glasses with. Also a kinde of minerall stone.

And English use of the name is recorded as early as 1651 in the works of Samuel Hartlib, who might today be classified as a “science communicator”:

Let him take notice of the several stones found in this Isle, as of Free-stones for building; Cobbels and rough hard stones for Paving […] Lapis Calaminaris is lately found in Summerset-shire, by the which Copper is made Brasse: Manganese for those that make white Glasse, lately found in the North.

In 1779 Louis Guyton de Morveau proposed that the black magnesia (i.e, manganese oxide) be called manganese to distinguish it from white magnesia (i.e., magnesium oxide):

Le minéral connu sous le nom de Magnesia nigra, que nous sommes convenus de traduire par le mot Manganèse, pour le distinguer de la magnésie blanche* est d’un usage sort ancien dans la verrierie.

(The mineral known by the name black magnesia, which we have agreed to translate with the word manganese, to distinguish it from white magnesia, is of ancient use in glassmaking.)

The note reads:

M. Bergman le nomme pour le même raison en latin Magnesium.

(For the same reason, Monsieur Bergman calls it in Latin magnesium.)

From this point on, the distinction between manganese and magnesium in nomenclature came into general use, but chemistry students continued to be confounded by the two elements.

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Sources:

Florio, John. A Worlde of Wordes. London: Arnold Hatfield for Edward Blount, 1598, 214. Early English Books Online.

Hartlib, Samuel. Samuel Hartlib His Legacie: Or an Enlargement of the Discourse of Husbandry Used in Brabant and Flaunders. London: H. Hills for Richard Wodenothe, 1651, 86–87. Early English Books Online.

Miśkowiec, Pawel. “Name Game: The Naming History of the Chemical Elements—Part 1—from Antiquity till the End of 18th Century.” Foundations of Chemistry, 1 November 2022. DOI: 10.1007/s10698-022-09448-5.  

de Morveau, Louis Guyton. “Observations d’une Manganèse étoilee artificielle.” Observations et Memoires sur la Physique, sur L’Histoire Naturelle et sur les Arts et Métiers, 13, 1779, 470–73 at 470. Biodiversity Heritage Library.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, September 2000, s.v. manganese, n.

Photo credit: US Geological Survey, 2010. Wikimedia Commons. Public domain image.

Africa

A twelfth-century T and O map from a manuscript of Isidore's Etymologiae identifying the three continents

31 January 2024

The name of Africa, the second largest continent in both size and population, comes from the Latin Africanus. The Latin name, in turn, probably comes from Ifran, the name of a people in what is now Tunisia and eastern Algeria, ancestors of the modern Amazigh (Berber) people. Various origins for the tribal name have been suggested including afar, a Tamazight (Berber) word for dust (“dusty land”), and ifri, a Tamazight word for cave (“land of cave dwellers”). But the definitive origin has probably been lost to the ages.

Its use as a place name in English dates to the Old English period. It appears in the opening of the Old English translation of Orosius’s Historiarum adversum paganos (History Against the Pagans). Orosius wrote it in the early fifth century CE, and the Old English translation dates to the turn of the ninth century. The text is less of a translation and more of an adaptation and expansion of Orosius’s Latin text:

Ure yldran ealne ðysne ymbhwyrft ðyses middangeardes, cwæþ Orosius, swa swa Oceanus ymbligeþ utan, þone man garsægc hatað, on þreo todældon and hy þa þry dælas on þreo tonemdon: Asiam and Europem and Affricam, þeah ðe sume men sædon þæt þær næran buton twegan dælas, Asia and þæt oþer Europe. Asia is befangen mid Oceanus þæm garsecge suþan and norþan and eastan and swa ealne middangeard from eastdæle healfne behæfð. Þonne on ðæm norþdæle, þæt is Asia on þa swiþran healfe in Danai þære ie, ðær Asia and Europe togædre licgað. And þonne of þære ilcan ie Danai suþ andlang Wendelsæs and þonne wiþ westan Alexandria þære byrig Asia and Affica togædere licgeað.

(Orosius said that our ancestors divided the whole circle of this earth into three parts, surrounded by the sea called Ocean, and they named these three parts Asia and Europe and Africa, though some people said that there were only two parts, Asia and the other being Europe. Asia is encompassed by the sea of Ocean south and north and east and contains all the eastern half of the earth. In the northern part, that is Asia on the right side of the river Don, there the boundaries of Asia and Europe run together. And then from the river Don the border runs south along the Mediterranean and then Asia and Africa meet west of the city of Alexandria.)

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Sources:

Everett-Heath, John. Concise Oxford Dictionary of World Place Names, sixth ed. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2020, s.v. Africa. Oxfordreference.com.

Godden, Malcolm R., ed. The Old English History of the World: An Anglo-Saxon Rewriting of Orosius. Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library 44. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2016, 24.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, September 2012, s.v. African, n. and adj.

Image credit: London, British Library, MS Royal 12 F.IV, fol. 135v. Wikimedia Commons. Public domain image.