neptunium

A nickel-clad sphere of neptunium used at Los Alamos National Lab to determine the critical mass of the element

15 March 2024

Neptunium is a transuranic chemical element with atomic number 93 and the symbol Np. It is a hard, silvery, ductile metal. Its practical applications are limited, serving primarily as precursor in plutonium production. It potentially could be used as fuel for nuclear reactors or as the fissionable material in a nuclear weapon but has apparently never been used for these.

There is some dispute over credit for neptunium’s discovery. In 1934, Enrico Fermi claimed to have discovered element 93, but was unable to isolate it chemically. Despite this, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics for this discovery and other related work. Then in 1939 and 1940, Edwin McMillan and Philip Abelson successfully isolated the element and catalogued its chemical properties. McMillan and Abelson are generally credited with the discovery, but some sources give Fermi the credit.

The first public mention of the name neptunium is in an article with a dateline of 8 June 1940 appearing in the Oakland Tribune (that being the local paper for Berkeley, California where McMillan and Abelson conducted their experiments):

Discoverers of the new element are Dr. Edwin M. McMillan, 32, aide to Dr. Ernest O. Lawrence, whose atom-smashing with the cyclotron won him the Nobel price, and Dr. Philip Hauge Abelson, Carnegie Institution, Washington, D.C. The new element, for which the name Neptunium, derived from the planet Neptune, has been suggested by Dr. McMillan, today took its place with atomic types making up the composition of water, air, iron salt and all other matter.

The article also mentions that researchers at Berkeley were close to discovering element 94, which would eventually be dubbed plutonium.

McMillan and Abelson published their findings in Physical Review on 15 June 1940, a week after the Oakland Tribune article appeared, but they did not mention the element’s name in that journal article. As for other coverage of the discovery, the local Tribune got a scoop, but no wire services followed up on it. The 30 August 1941 issue of Science News Letter also notes the discovery and the name, but these two are the only public mentions of the element until after the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings in August 1945. The lack of coverage is undoubtedly due to wartime censorship of nuclear research.

There is, however, a classified government report from 19 March 1942, authored by Glenn Seaborg and Arthur Wahl that discusses the naming of elements 93 and 94:

Since formulae are confusing when the symbols "93” and “94” are used, we have decided to use symbols of the conventional chemical type to designate these elements. Following McMillan, who has suggested the name neptunium (after Neptune, the first planet beyond Uranus) for element 93, we suggest plutonium (after Pluto, the second planet beyond Uranus) for element 94. The corresponding chemical symbols would be Np and Pu.

So the names neptunium and plutonium make a connection between the scales of the universe at the very small and the large.

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Sources:

“Group of Elements Beyond Uranium Is Found Possible.” Science News Letter, 30 August 1941, 135/1. JSTOR.

McMillan, Edwin and Philip Hauge Abelson. “Radioactive Element 93.” Physical Review, 57, 15 June 1940, 1185–86. Physical Review Journals Archive. DOI: 10.1103/PhysRev.57.1185.2.

Miśkowiec, Pawel. “Name Game: The Naming History of the Chemical Elements—Part 3—Rivalry of Scientists in the Twentieth Century.” Foundations of Chemistry, 12 November 2022. DOI: 10.1007/s10698-022-09452-9.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, September 2003, s.v. neptunium, n.

Seaborg, Glenn T. and Arthur C. Wahl. The Chemical Properties of Elements 94 and 93. US Atomic Energy Commission, AECD-1829, 19 March 1942. HathiTrust Digital Archive. [The version at HathiTrust is a later reprint of the original, published in 1947 or later, when the report was declassified. It contains a note to a 1946 report, so it has been altered from the original in some respects, but the text quoted here would seem to have come unaltered from the original.]

“U.C. Cyclotron Scientists Find Mysterious New Physical Element” (8 June 1940). Oakland Tribune, 9 June 1940, 4-A/1. NewspaperArchive.com.

Photo credit: Los Alamos National Laboratory, 2002. Wikimedia Commons. Public domain image.

jejune

Moscow youth, 2013

13 March 2024

The etymology of jejune is a pretty much straightforward one, but the history of the word provides a good illustration of two processes. One, you can clearly see how the word was borrowed from Latin and then anglicized. And two, one of its present-day meanings came about via an erroneous assumption about its etymology.

The word comes from the Latin jejunus meaning fasting, going without food, and in fact there is an obsolete English sense of jejune meaning just that. But the Latin word can also mean meager, unsatisfying, without substance, and this sense also exists in the English record as far back as the hungry one, that is to the turn of the seventeenth century, if not earlier.

We can see the pattern of borrowing into English begin in a commonplace book (manuscript) owned by King Henry VII (1457–1509) that was printed and published in 1599. A commonplace book is personally curated collection of essays, poems, quotations, etc. The word appears in a poem comparing a woman’s beauty to that of goddesses, reminiscent of the Judgment of Paris from Greek mythology:

If that among those faire godeses, thou faire godes hadst ben,
Thou hadst surpast them (there, as a fourth Godes) all.
Iuno, she how ieiune? Now pale had Pallas apeared?
And Venus how vainelike? Thou then an only godesse.

Note that jejune is not only wordplay on the name Juno, but it is italicized in the published text. From the early days of printing through the eighteenth century, it was a common practice for printers to italicize proper names, but adjectives would only be highlighted if they were deemed to be foreign or unfamiliar. So here we have the word being used in an English text, but it has not been fully adopted into English yet.

Sixteen years later, we see jejune without italics, but still connected by allusion to the Latin. This appears in the “Dedication” at the beginning of George Chapman’s 1615 translation of Homer’s Odyssey. Chapman (c.1559–1634) was a contemporary of Shakespeare and the first to make complete translations of the Iliad and the Odyssey into English. (When I was getting my degree from the University of Toronto, the English Department’s softball team was dubbed Chapman’s Homers. That’s the second-best team name I’ve ever encountered, beaten only by the team fielded by the university’s Centre for Medieval Studies, who were the Papal Bulls. But I digress.) The relevant passage read:

To many most souer aigne praises is this Poeme entitled; but to that Grace in chiefe, which sets on the Crowne, both of Poets and Orators; τὸ τὰ μικρὰ μεγάλως, καὶ τὰ κοινὰ καιίνως: that is, Parua magnè dicere; peruulgata nouè; ieiuna plenè: To speake things litle, greatly; things commune, rarely; things barren and emptie, fruitfully and fully. The returne of a man into his Countrie, is his whole scope and obiect; which, in it selfe, your Lordship may well say, is ieiune and fruitlesse enough; affoording nothing feastfull, nothing magnificent.

While Chapman’s use of jejune is not technically a translation, it appears immediately after the Latin. But it is not italicized. It is in the process of being assimilated, but it still requires some explanation for readers to understand.

But that same year we also get jejune used in English both without italics and without any direct reference to the Latin. From a religious treatise by Calvinist theologian Thomas Jackson:

Euen after the infusion of faith most perfect, faithfull repentance for sins committed, is as absolutely necessarie to saluation, as the first iufusion [sic] was. Nor is this heauenly pledge, while dormant, though truely dwelling in our soules, immediately apt to iustifie: their conceite of these great mysteries is to ieiune & triuiall, which make iustification but one indiuisible transitory act, or mutatum esse, from the state of nature to the state of grace.

That covers the traditional meaning of jejune and how it was adopted into English. But the word has another meaning in present-day English, that of childish or naïve. That sense arises in the late nineteenth century and may be from a mistaken idea of the word’s etymology. People evidently thought the word came from the Latin juvenis, which gives us juvenile and junior, or the French jeune (young). Or it could simply be a development from the sense of meager, unsatisfying.

The earliest use of the childish sense that I have found (there are undoubtedly earlier ones to be found) is from the New York newspaper Truth of 17 June 1883. It is in an article about the arrival of militia in Peekskill, New York for their summer training:

Jejune school girls gathered upon the street corners, exchanged chews of gum and undying affection, and imparted to each other in strictest confidence the conquests of Sister Jane and Cousin Molly in formdr [sic] campaigns, and their hopes and plans for the coming struggle. But to this picture of jollity and happiness there was a lining of misery which exhibited itself in the sour looks and monosyllabic answers of the bucolic youths, who foresaw the oblivion to which they were consigned for the next three months at least by the advent of the gay “sojer laddies.”

The childish sense may have started out as an error, but it can no longer be considered to be one. The meaning of words is ultimately determined by how they are used, not where they come from.

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Sources:

Chapman, George, trans. Homer’s Odysses. London: Richard Field and W. Jaggard for Nathaniell Butter, 1615, sig. A4r. Early English Books Online (EEBO).

The First Booke of the Preseruation of King Henry the VII. London: R. Bradock, 1599, sig. N4r–v. Early English Books Online (EEBO).

Jackson, Thomas. Iustifying Faith. London: John Beale, 1615, 256. Early English Books Online (EEBO).

“Our National Guard.” Truth (New York City), 17 June 1883, 1/6. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, s.v. jejune, adj.

Photo credit: Katya Alagich, 2013. Flickr. Wikimedia Commons. Used under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.

tacit

Illustration of socage, the requirement of service to a lord’s estate in a 14th-century manuscript, peasants harvesting wheat for their lord

11 March 2024

Tacit is an adjective that denotes something that is silently or wordlessly understood. It’s etymology is quite straightforward, a borrowing from the Latin tacitus, the past participle of the verb tacere, meaning to be silent.

Thomas Eliot’s 1538 dictionary records the Latin. Early dictionaries like this one included only foreign words, proper nouns, or otherwise “hard” words. It’s an indication that the word might be encountered by an English reader, but not necessarily that it had yet been assimilated into the language:

Tacenda, those thynges whiche are not to be spoken.
Taceo, ta, cui, tacêre, to kepe sylence, to be in reste, to be quyete, to be sure.
Tacito pede, softely, by stelthe.
Tacitum est, not a worde is spoken of it.
Taciturnitas, tatis, sylence.
Tacitus, he that holdethe his peace, and is secrete.
Tacitus, citius audies, be styl, thou shalt here the sooner.
Tacitè, without speakynge one worde.

Eliot includes a nearly identical set of entries in his 1542 Bibliotheca Eliotæ.

The earliest use of tacit in English discourse that I know of is in Richard Taverner’s 1540 The Principal Lawes, Customes, and Estatutes of England, in a passage that describes what constitutes an unspoken manumission of a serf:

Lykewyse yf the Lorde maketh a feoffement to his villayne, and maketh vnto hym lyuery of seysin, thys also is an enfranchisment and secret manumission[n]. Brefely to speke, where so euer the lorde compelleth his vyllaine by the course of the lawe to do that thyng that he myght otherwyse e[n]force him to do or to suffre without the auctoritie and compulsion of the lawe, he doth by implication enfranchise his villayne, as if the lorde wyl bryng agaynst his villayne an action of det, an action of accompt, of couenant or of trespace, these and such lyke be in the eye of the lawe enfranchisementes and manumissions, bycause that the lorde in all these cases may haue the effecte and purpose of his suite (that is to saye) the goodes, catels, and correctio[n] of his bondman without the compulsion of the lawe euen by his owne propre power and authoritie whyche he hath vpon hys villayne. But if the lord doth sue his vilayne by an appeale of felonye, the villayne beyng lawfully endyted of the same before, this is no tacite manumission or infranchiseme[n]te, for the lorde though he haue power to beate his villaine and to spoyle him of his goodes, yet he can not by the lawe of this Realme put him to deathe.

(Likewise, if a lord invests one of his serfs with a fief, and gives him title to land, this is also an enfranchisement and silent manumission. In short, wherever a lord compels one of his serfs by recourse to the law to do something that he might otherwise have the power to make him do without the authority and compulsion of the law, he by implication enfranchises that serf; for example, if a lord brings against one of his serfs an action of debt, an action of account, of covenant, or of trespass, these and like actions are enfranchisements and manumissions in the eyes of the law, because a lord in all these cases has the effect and purpose of his suit, that is to say the goods, chattel, and correction of his bondman without compulsion of the law by his own proper power and authority which he has over his serfs. But if a lord sues one of his serfs by an appeal of felony, the serf being lawfully indicted of the same, this is no tacit manumission or enfranchisement, for a lord, though he has power to beat his serfs and to take their goods, he cannot by the law of this realm put them to death.)

In other words, if a lord takes a legal action that treats a serf as if they were free, then it is a tacit admission that the serf is indeed a free person, and the serf is indeed free.

Since the sixteenth century, tacit has pretty much come through the centuries unchanged in meaning or form.

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Sources:

Eliot, Thomas. The Dictionary of Syr Thomas Eliot Knyght. London: Thomas Bertelet, 1538, sig. Bb.6r. Early English Books Online (EEBO).

———. Bibliotheca Eliotæ. London: Thomas Berthelet, 1542, s.v. tacitè. Early English Books Online (EEBO).

Lexicons of Early Modern English (LEME). Accessed 28 January 2024.

Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, s.v. tacit, adj.

Taverner, Richard. The Principal Lawes, Customes, and Estatutes of England. London: 1540, fol. 52v–53r. Early English Books Online (EEBO).

Image credit: Queen Mary Psalter, British Library, Royal MS 2 B.vii, fol. 78v. Wikimedia Commons. Public domain image.

neon

Broadway and Times Square, New York City, at night

8 March 2024

Neon is a chemical element, a noble gas, with atomic number 10 and the symbol Ne. It was discovered in 1898 by William Ramsay and Morris W. Travers, who named it after the Greek νέον (new). Neon has a small number of applications, the most well known of which is, of course, in lighting and signage because it emits a distinctive reddish-orange glow when an electrical current is applied to it.

The word is also used as an adjective to describe something that brightly or gaudily colored. We see this adjectival use as early as 1930. There is this article from the Omaha World-Herald of 2 February 1930 describing plans for an upcoming airshow:

A new sport trainer, as yet unfinished, will be shown by Overland Airways. The craft is being assembled for government tests for an approved type certificate from the department of commerce, and should be completed within the next 10 days, according to Roy Furstenburg, president of the company. It is to be painted a “neon red” color.

While neon signs glow red, the adjective is not restricted to that color. For instance, we have this note on golfers’ sartorial choices that appeared in the Oregonian on 17 March 1933:

Somewhat more brightly hued, almost to the point of being lurid, is a chiffon frock in a blue that might be called Neon blue, and which is sashed in bright fuchsia red.

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Sources:

“Air Concerns Co-Operate in Offering Plane Show.” Omaha World-Herald (Nebraska), 2 February 1930, 2-C/4. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

Jones, Catherine. “Three-Piece Dress New for Golfers.” Oregonian (Portland), 27 March 1933, 6/3. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

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, September 2003, s.v. neon, n. and adj.

Ramsay, William and Morris W. Travers. “On the Companions of Argon.” Proceedings of the Royal Society of London, 63, 13 June 1898, 437–40 at 438–39. JSTOR.

Photo credit: Willem van Bergen, 2006. Flickr. https://www.flickr.com/photos/willemvanbergen/271211849/ Used under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic license.

lunatic fringe

Image: Cubist Room, International Exhibition of Modern Art, Chicago 1913

6 March 2024

As commonly used today, a lunatic fringe is an extremist minority in a movement or group. But that’s not its original meaning. The earliest uses of the phrase deprecatingly refer to a woman’s hairstyle, one where the hair is cut straight across the forehead, that is to say, in bangs. The phrase appears in the 1870s as part of a cluster of similar terms for bangs, including idiot fringe and convict style. From these, the underlying metaphor is clear. The hairstyle was called that because they resembled the haircuts given to those who were institutionalized.

The political use of lunatic fringe to denote an extremist group crops up shortly after the name of the hairstyle became popular, but then disappears from published sources until it is reintroduced and popularized in 1913 by Theodore Roosevelt. Whether this political usage remained in slang use in the intervening decades, not seeing the light of publication, or if Roosevelt recoined the term is uncertain.

The phrase idiot fringe first appears in the pages of the London Daily News on 15 March 1873, and the article was reprinted in a number of papers in the United States in the weeks that followed:

Indeed, a great many ideas have been borrowed from that opera [i.e., La Coupe du Roi de Thule] by Paris modistes and hair-dressers, who not unfrequently do up ladies of a respectable age to imitate “the syrens of the Coral Cave.” One of the insensate things decidedly out of date is “the idiot fringe.” Those who wish to limit their foreheads to the depth of the eyebrow should make use of curling-irons, and keep the Roman Empresses in their heads.

And we see convict style alongside idiot fringe in Vermont’s St. Albans Daily Messenger of 26 April 1873:

“Convict style” and “idiot fringe” are the appropriate and suggestive names applied to two of the present styles of arranging the front hair.

And lunatic fringe itself appears twice in a short story, titled Four Days, published in February 1874:

“Was that why you studied so hard all winter, and wouldn’t go to singing-school, you sly thing?” said Lizzie, eyebrows and lunatic fringe almost meeting again.

We see lunatic fringe used in relation to politics in the midst of the hotly contested Tilden-Hayes presidential election of 1876. A letter published in Connecticut’s Daily Constitution of 26 July 1876, and reprinted in papers across the country, has the following. In this passage lunatic fringe is still literally denoting the hairstyle, but it’s also being associated with extreme political positions, in particular the Ku Klux Klan, which the letter-writer claims has engineered the nomination of Tilden against the wishes of the Democratic rank and file:

“Lunatic fringe,” is the term applied now-a-days to the short cropped hair so often seen dangling on a lady’s forehead. But Tilden with a “hard-money” label dangling on his breast, a “soft-money” label on his back, with “reform” painted on his forehead, “free schools” swinging from one ear, for the Protestant “church schools,” and from the other for the Catholic, with one hand filled with “pudding-tickets” to make the illegal vote of New York City overcome the honest vote of the State, and other had filled with stolen Western town and county railroad subscriptions, is the most be-“fringed” spectacle now on exhibition.

But I have been unable to find any other non-coiffure-related uses of lunatic fringe until 29 March 1913, when Theodore Roosevelt published a disparaging review of the seminal, and therefore controversial, International Exhibition of Modern Art, held at the 69th Regimental Armory in New York City from February to March of that year, and therefore popularly labeled as the Armory Show. The show, which would subsequently move on to Chicago and Boston included artists such as Cassatt, Cézanne, Degas, Delacroix, Duchamp, Gauguin, van Gogh, Kandinsky, Toulouse-Lautrec, Manet, Matisse, Monet, Munch, Picasso, Renoir, Rodin, Seurat, and Whistler, among others.

Roosevelt wrote of the exhibit:

Probably in any reform movement, any progressive movement, in any field of life, the penalty for avoiding the commonplace is a liability to extravagance. It is vitally necessary to move forward and to shake off the dead hand, often the fossilized dead hand, of the reactionaries; and yet we have to face the fact that there is apt to be a lunatic fringe among the votaries of any forward movement. In this recent art exhibition the lunatic fringe was fully in evidence, especially in the rooms devoted to the Cubists and the Futurists, or Near-Impressionists.

We don’t know if Roosevelt put into print a slang term that was common, but unpublished, at the time or if he recalled its use from the days of his youth, but the combination of avant-garde art and a titan of American politics proved irresistible, and his comment was reprinted in papers across the country and entered American political parlance for good. We see it starting to appear, independent of quotations of Roosevelt, the following month, when this appears in the 20 April 1913 edition of the Duluth News Tribune:

Every new movement has its “lunatic fringe;” the more important and vital the subject the more pronounced this fringe. This is inevitable. In common parlance these effervescent, vociferous extremists are known to politics as demagogues, men who talk more than they think.

Roosevelt would use the phrase again a few months later in the context of politics. From Portland’s Oregonian of 12 October 1913:

As I have already said, there is a lunatic fringe to every reform movement. At least nine-tenths of all the sincere reformists supported me; but the ultra-pacifists, the so-called anti-imperialists, or anti-militarists, or peace-at-any-price men, preferred Croker to me.

I suspect there are political uses of lunatic fringe between 1876 and 1913 that have yet to be found. As more old newspapers are digitized and as more smaller databases are explored, such uses may very well appear. But until then the question of whether Roosevelt recoined the expression or if he simply brought a slang usage into the mainstream cannot be decided.

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Sources:

“Fashionable Frivolities in Paris.” London Daily News, 15 March 1873, 5/7. NewspaperArchive.com.

“In General.” St. Albans Daily Messenger (Vermont), 26 April 1873, 1/6. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

May, Sophie. “Four Days.” Oliver Optic’s Magazine, February 1874, 140–43 at 142/1 and 143/1. Google Books. (The OED has this same citation as coming from the magazine Our Boys and Girls of the same date.)

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, July 2023, s.v. lunatic fringe, n. and adj.; November 2010, s.v. idiot fring, n.

“Our Washington Letter” (26 July 1876). Daily Constitution (Middletown, Connecticut), 29 July 1876, 2/2. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

Roosevelt, Theodore. “Colonel Roosevelt Turns the Spotlight of Reminiscence on the N.Y. Governorship.” Oregonian (Portland), 12 October 1913, 6/2. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

Roosevelt, Theodore. “A Layman’s View of an Art Exhibition.” The Outlook, 29 March 1913, 718–20 at 719/1. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

“Solvent Insanity.” Duluth News Tribune (Minnesota), 20 April 1913, 6/1. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

Tréguer, Pascal. “‘Idiot Fringe’: Meanings and Origin.” Wordhistories.net, 31 August 2023.

———. “‘Lunatic Fringe’: Meanings and Origin.” Wordhistories.net, 1 September 2023.

Image credit: Anonymous photographer, 1913. Wikimedia Commons. Art Institute of Chicago. Public domain photo.