thallium

Crystals of hutchinsonite, an ore containing thallium

11 October 2023

Thallium is a chemical element with atomic number 81 and the symbol Tl. It was discovered independently by chemists William Crookes and Claude-Auguste Lamy in 1861, but Crookes was the first to publish and was the one to name the element. The name is from the Greek θαλλός (thallos, green plant shoot) + -ium, after the bright green line in the element’s spectrum.

Crookes published his discovery in March 1861, but the announcement did not propose a name. Two months later, he named it:

I have thought it best to give in the present article a few additional observations which I have since made, and also to propose for it, the provisional name of Thallium, from the Greek θαλλός, or Latin thallus, a budding twig,—a word which is frequently employed to express the beautiful green tint of young vegetation; and which I have chosen as the green line which it communicates to the spectrum recals [sic] with particular vividness the fresh colour of vegetation at the present time.

Thallium and its compounds are highly toxic. Thallium sulfate was once widely used as a pesticide, but this use is now generally banned out of safety concerns. Thallium salts were also used to treat various medical conditions, but these uses have largely been superseded by more effective and safer medicines. It is currently used in the manufacture of optical glass and of electronic components. A radioactive isotope is used in nuclear medicine, and the element may have practical applications in high-temperature superconductors.

Discuss this post

---

Sources:

Crookes, William. “Further Remarks on the Supposed New Metalloid.” The Chemical News, 3.76, 18 May 1861, 303. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

———. “On the Existence of a New Element, Probably of the Sulphur Group.” The Chemical News, 3.69, 30 March 1861, 193–94. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

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, second edition, 1989, s.v. thallium, n.

Photo credit: Robert M. Lavinsky, before 2010. Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.

hydro

Sir Adam Beck Generating Complex, Niagara Falls, Ontario

9 October 2024

Moving to another country can be disorienting. But moving to Canada, at least to the anglophone provinces, from the United States is different. To the casual observer, things in Canada seem pretty much the same as in the States. When it comes to language, aside from minor variations like the spelling of licence, favour, and centre, Canadian English is not all that different from that spoken south of the forty-ninth parallel. But one that can trip up migrants from the south is the use of the word hydro. In ads for apartments, one commonly sees the line “utilities, except hydro, included.” When I moved to Toronto in 2010, this baffled me. In the United States, it is common for utilities, with the exception of electricity, to be included in the rent. But here, it seemed that electricity was included and water wasn’t. I was well into the search for a place to live when I discovered that hydro meant electricity.

Hydro, of course, comes from the Greek ύδωρ and its combining form ύδρο-, meaning water. It is a clipping of the older hydroelectric (1844) or hydropower (1906).

We see hydro power in a Canadian context in an article with a dateline of 29 December 1911 in Toronto’s Globe and Mail:

Hon. Adam Beck turned on the Hydro power in the home of his birth here to-night. In the presence of almost the entire population of the thriving village. Baden is the first of the smaller towns and villages to use Niagara power, and this evening the streets were illuminated for the first time with electricity generated at the Falls.

Adam Beck was the founder of the Hydro-Electric Power Commission of Ontario

And a few years later we see the clipped hydro referring to hydroelectric power. From a short biography of Beck in Augustus Bridle’s 1916 Sons of Canada:

Had there been no cataract at Niagara, not even the political dominie of Ontario could have produced Adam Beck The product of Niagara, according to Beck, is Hydro-Electric—familiarly abbreviated to Hydro, tabloided to H.E.

And because so much of Ontario’s and Quebec’s electricity was generated hydroelectrically, within a couple of decades hydro was being used to refer to electricity regardless of the source. From Frederick Grove’s 1939 Two Generations, a Story of Present Day Ontario:

“I don’t suppose you have word from down south?” Phil asked of the attendant. “Jarvis way, I mean?”

“That where you’re going?”

“Trying to,” Phil said.

Well-l-l, it’s been sleet there: the telephone and hydro wires are down. You want to be on the look-out.

“Milk trucks coming through?”

“Dunno. Haven’t seen any.”

“Well, doesn’t matter.” Phil laughed as if obstacles in their way and difficulties to be overcome were so many attractions.

“Watch for the road-signs.,” Alice said as she inserted herself behind the wheel.

The attendant, having received his money, rand for shelter, averting his face from the wind.

And we get this in Selwyn Dewdney’s 1946 novel Wind Without Rain:

“Then,” he went on inexorably, “there’s travel. Toronto and Montreal: there’s another fifty down the drain—with the rent that makes practically a hundred and fifty. Balance, a hundred and twenty-five. Food, hydro, water, telephone for September, forty dollars.”

So, hydro is a product of a number of etymological processes. It is borrowed from Greek, compounded, then clipped, then semantically shifted to a new sense that can be confusing to those new to Canada.

Discuss this post

---

Sources:

“Baden’s Ovation to Hon. Mr. Beck” (29 December 1911). Globe and Mail (Toronto), 30 December 1911, 13/1. ProQuest Historical Newspapers.

Bridle, Augustus. Sons of Canada. Toronto: J. M. Dent and Sons, 1916, 185. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Dewdney, Selwyn. Wind Without Rain. Toronto: Copp Clark, 1946, 236.

Dictionary of Canadianisms on Historical Principles, second edition (DHCP-2), 2017, s.v. hydro, n.

Grove, Frederick Philip. Two Generations: A Story of Present-Day Ontario. Toronto: Ryerson Press, 1939, 230.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, July 2023, s.v. hydro, n.2, hydroelectric, adj., hydropower, n.

Photo credit: Ontario Power Generation, 2007. Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.

tarot

Image of le Fou (the Fool) from a fifteenth-century tarot deck

7 October 2024

Tarot is the name of a type of playing card which is often also used for cartomancy (i.e., divination or fortune-telling using cards). There are a wide variety of games that can be played with a tarot deck. Over the centuries, there have been many variations in what tarot decks contain, but they generally consist of four suits, each containing ten pip cards (ace through ten) and four face cards (king, queen, knight, and jack), plus a trump suit of twenty-one cards, known as trionfi (triumphs), and a fool card. References to the predecessors of what we now know as tarot, that is tarocchi, can be found in Italy from at least 1419. There are accounts of tarrochi decks being used for cartomancy from the early sixteenth century.

The name is a borrowing from the French tarot, which in turn is from the Italian slang/dialectal *tarocco (plural tarocchi) meaning fool or foolish. English references to the games date to the late sixteenth century. The earliest I’m aware of is G. Delamothe’s 1592 The French Alphabeth, a textbook on learning the French language:

Come, what shall we doe? What you will, shall we play? What game will you play at? will you play at Tables, at Dyce, at Tarots, at Chesses, &c. No, let vs play at Cardes, to the end that all the companie may play together.

Or ça que fero[n]s nous? Ce q[ue] vous voudrez, Iouerons nous? A quel ieu voulez vous iouer? Voulez vous iouer aux Dames, aux Dez, aux Tarots, aux Eschets, &c. Non, iouons au Chartes, afin que toute la compagnie ioue ensemble.

Until the late nineteenth century, almost all English uses of the term are in translations from French or in references to card games played on the Continent. This would indicate that in these early days tarot, both for gaming and cartomancy, was not particularly common in England. Also, these early uses are all in the sense of games that could be played with such a deck, not the cards themselves.

The earliest English-language use of tarot to refer to the cards, as opposed to a game that could be played with them, is in an 1870 English translation of the second edition of Paul Lacroix’s (Bibliophile Jacob’s) 1869 Les Arts au Moyen Age (The Arts of the Middle Ages):

No original specimen has been preserved of the tarots (tarrochi, tarrochini) or Italian cards of this epoch; but we possess a pack engraved about 1460, which is known to be an exact copy of them. Added to this, Raphael Maffei, who lived at the end of the fifteenth century, has left in his “Commentaries” a description of tarots, which were, he says, “a new invention,”—in comparison, doubtless, with the origin of playing-cards.

We see the word used outside of translation in William Skeen’s 1872 Early Typography:

Mr. Planché, while abstaining from the expression of an opinion upon the principal point in dispute, shews, as a matter of fact in regard to playing cards, that “with the exception of those by the Master of 1466 (an engraver only known by that designation), and a set of ‘tarots,’ called the Mantegna Cards, on one of which is the date 1483, all the specimens of printed playing cards that he has met with display the unmistakeable character of the fashions of Germany, France, and England, during the latter half of the Fifteenth century, and the greatest portion those of the latest part,—Louis XI, Charles VIII, of France; Edward IV, and Henry VII, of England; and Maximilian I , Emperor of Germany.”

And a few pages later Skeen writes:

On this subject Mr. Planché writes, “There is plenty of evidence to prove that cards, drawn, painted, and gilded by the hand, like those of Jacquemin-Gringonneur, and to which the name of ‘Tarot cards’ has been given, found their way into Europe from the East in the Fourteenth century, or perhaps earlier.

To which there is this note:

Gringonneur was paid for the cards drawn and painted for Charles VI in 1392, fifty-six sous of Paris, which is calculated to be about £7 1s. 8d. of our present money, and a single pack of “tarots,” admirably painted about 1415 by Marziano, Secretary to the Duke of Milan, cost the enormous sum of 1,500 golden crowns (about £625).

Two years later, Matilda Anne Mackarness (the daughter of Planché, the playwright and antiquary to whom Skeen refers) wrote in her 1874 Children of the Olden Time:

The old story that cards were invented for the amusement of the poor mad King of France (Charles VI.) is disputed. The mistake has probably arisen from the fact that in the treasury register belonging to that monarch, fifty-six sols were paid to one Jacquemin Gringonneur, painter, "for three packs of cards, gilded and painted with divers colours.” It is the opinion of many learned writers that cards were used in Eastern lands long before they were known in Europe, called “tarot cards,” but they were very unlike our present playing-cards. The gipsies used them for telling fortunes, as they do now; and being all pictures, they would amuse children, and probably they were made brighter and gayer to please the poor king.

So it isn’t until the late nineteenth century that tarot becomes fully anglicized. And in the anglophone world, tarot has always been primarily used for cartomancy rather than gaming.

Discuss this post

---

Sources:

Caldwell, Ross Sinclair. “Brief History of Cartomancy.” Academia.edu. This is an English translation of Caldwell’s “Origine della cartomanzia.” In Il Castello dei Tarocchi. Andrea Vitali, ed. Turin: Lo Scarabeo, 2010, 163–76.

Delamothe, G. The French Alphabeth. London: R. Field, 1592, 150–51. ProQuest: Early English Books Online (EEBO).

Lacroix, Paul (Bibliophile Jacob). Les Arts au Moyen Age, second edition. Paris: Didot Frères et Fils, 1869, 235–236. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

———. The Arts of the Middle Ages. James Dafforne, trans. London: Chapman and Hall, 1870, 229.

MacKarness, Matilda Anne (Mrs. Henry S.). Children of the Olden Time. London: Griffith and Farran, 1874, 26–27. Gale Primary Sources: Nineteenth Century Collections Online.

Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, s.v. tarot, n., taroc, n.

Skeen, William. Early Typography. Colombo, Ceylon: 1872, 48–49, and 53–54. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Image credit: Unknown artist, fifteenth century. Lacroix, Paul. Les Arts au Moyen Age, second edition. Paris: Didot Frères et Fils, 1869, 235. HathiTrust Digital Archive. Public domain image.

strontium

4 October 2024

Strontium is a chemical element with atomic number 38 and the symbol Sr. It is a highly reactive, soft, silver-white/yellowish metal. The isotopes found in strontium ores are all stable, but nuclear fission produces radioactive ones, including strontium-90, which has a half-life of 28.9 years. Strontium-90 is a product of reactor accidents and nuclear weapons and can cause bone cancer (due to strontium’s ability to replace calcium in bones) and leukemia.

Strontium was heavily used in producing the glass for cathode-ray tubes (CRTs) used in televisions and computer monitors because it blocked X-rays, but with the switch to liquid-crystal display (LCD) devices, this use has fallen away. Strontium aluminate is used in glow-in-the-dark toys; strontium carbonate is used in fireworks, giving them a deep-red color; and strontium carbonate is used in some toothpastes. The shorter-lived radioactive isotopes have applications in nuclear medicine.

The element is named for Strontian, the Scottish village where the mineral was first discovered in the local lead mines. The Gaelic name, sron an t-sithein, translates as nose of the fairies. Chemist and physician Adair Crawford was the first to identify the mineral and posit that it was a distinct element, but he didn’t give it a name, referring to it as the Strontean mineral or the Scotch mineral:

The salt which is obtained from the combination of the Strontean mineral with muriatic acid, is much more soluble in hot water than in cold, and therefore easily chrystallizes by cooling.

And

It is probable, indeed, that the Scotch mineral is a new species of earth which has not hitherto been sufficiently examined.

The first to give the mineral a name were physicians Friedrich Gabriel Sulzer and Johann Friedrich Blumenbach in 1791, calling it strontianite. That name is still used to refer to the raw mineral ore:

Ich habe dieses interessante Fossil, das eine eigne Grunderde zu enthalten scheint, einstweilen in meiner kleinen Sammlung Strontianit getauft, und werde, was ich noch davon habe, zu fernern Versuchen aufopfern.

(I have, for the time being, christened this interesting fossil in my small collection, which seems to contain its own basic earth, strontianite and will sacrifice what I still have of it for future research.)

(Blumenbach is perhaps more famous for being one the founders of now thoroughly discredited “race science.” And his five racial categories survive today in those used by the U.S. Census Bureau.)  

Chemist Humphry Davy was the first to isolate the element some two decades latter using the then-new process of electrolysis. In 1808 Davy successfully isolated and named four alkaline earths, barium, calcium, magnesium, and strontium, adding the -ium ending to the root of the Scottish name:

These new substances will demand names; and on the same principles as I have named the bases of the fixed alkalies, potassium and sodium, I shall venture to denominate the metals from the alkaline earths barium, strontium, calcium, and magnium; the last of these words is undoubtedly objectionable, but magnesium has been already applied to metallic manganese, and would consequently have been an equivocal term.

Discuss this post

---

Sources:

Crawford, Adair. “On the Medicinal Properties of the Muriated Barytes” (10 November 1789). Medical Communications, vol. 2. London: Joseph Johnson, 1790, 301–359 at 354 and 355. Gale Primary Sources: Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO).

Davy, Humphry. “Electro-Chemical Researches, on the Decomposition of the Earths; with Observations on the Metals Obtained from the Alkaline Earths, and on the Amalgam Procured from Ammonia.” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, 98, 30 June 1808, 333–70 at 346. Gale Primary Sources: Nineteenth Century Collections 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.

Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, s.v. strontium, n., strontia, n., strontian, n.

Sulzer, F. G., and J. F. Blumenbach. “Über den Strontianit, ein Schottisches Foßil, das ebenfalls eine neue Grunderde zu enthalten scheint.” Bergmännisches Journal, May 1791, 433–436 at 433. Google Books.

Photo credit: Peter Van den Bossche, 2007. Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license.

ass / arse / donkey

2 October 2024

An ass is domesticated equine, Equus asinus, otherwise known as a donkey. But an ass, or arse, can also refer to the human buttocks. These are two distinct words that happen to be, at least in American English, pronounced and spelled the same. Both can be traced with confidence to Old English, but earlier than that the origins of both are somewhat unclear.

The name of the animal is ultimately from the Latin asinus, although the exact route into Old English is uncertain. Donkeys were rare in early medieval Britain, so knowledge of the animal and its name probably chiefly came from written (Irish?) sources. The word may be a direct borrowing from Latin, although that has phonological problems. More likely it is borrowed from a Celtic language, which in turn would have taken it from Latin. Old Irish has assan, and Welsh, Old Cornish, and Middle Breton have asen. Any of these are possible. For its part, Latin probably borrowed it from a Central Asian language, which would give it a non-Indo-European root. The Mycenaean Greek o-no and the ancient Greek ὄνος (onos), which give us onager, also seem to be from a non-Indo-European source.

The Old English assa (weak masculine inflection) meant a donkey of either sex, and assen (strong feminine inflection) was used to refer a female donkey. We see the word in the Old English translation of Genesis 12:16, about the Egyptians who were trying to buy Sarah from Abraham:

& Abram underfeng fela sceatta for hyre: he hæfde ða on orfe & on ðeowum, on oluendum & on asssum mycele æhta.

(And he [pharaoh] offered Abraham many treasures for her [Sarah]; he acquired then many possessions: cattle & servants, & camels & asses.)

Use of ass as a derogatory epithet for a person is almost as old as the name of the animal. From the Old English translation of Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy:

Gif þu on hwilcum men ongitst þæt he bið gitsere and reafere, ne scealt ðu hine na hatan mon ac wulf; and þone reðan þe bið þweorteme ðu scealt hatan hund nalles mon; and þone leasan lytegan þu scealt hatan fox næs man; and þone ungemetlice modgan and yrsiendan þe to micelne andan hæfð þu scealt hatan leo næs man; and þone sænan þe bið swa slaw þu scealt hatan assa ma þonne man.

(If you see in some man that he is greedy and a robber, you must not call him a man but a wolf; and the fierce man who is quarrelsome you must call a dog not a man; and the false deceiver you must call a fox not a man; and the excessively proud and angry person who has too much malice, you must call a lion not a man; and the sluggish who is too slow [you] must call an ass rather than a man.)

(Actually, the translation of Boethius, created at the end of the ninth century, is about a century older than the translation of Genesis. These quotations are not intended to be the earliest, and logically the name of the animal had to come first.)

Arse, meaning the buttocks, is from a common Proto-Germanic root, cf. the German arsch and the Dutch aars. The Old English ears appears only once in the extant corpus, in a gloss of the Latin anus, but we also see the root used in compounds, again mainly in glosses and in medical texts, such as earsendu (arse-end, the buttocks), earsgang (arse-privy, a privy or fecal discharge), earslira (arse-flesh, the buttocks), and earsþyrel (arse-hole). These compounds are primarily also found in glosses; earsgang (fecal discharge) appears in medical texts.

The fact that ears only appears once in the corpus is unsurprising. The Old English texts we have today are not a representative sample of the language as a whole, with the texts that are preserved are those that monks and nuns deemed worthy of being copied and kept. The surviving corpus, therefore, overwhelmingly consists of limited range of topics, such as texts of religious significance, legal documents, historical chronicles, and a smattering of mostly religious poetry, none of which are likely to contain references to body parts. The number of compounds, however, indicates the word was in common use. The Middle English ars or ers is much more common, probably a result of that corpus reflecting a wider range of writers and scribes. Consideration of the word as indecent or obscene starts in the Early Modern era and is fully in place by the eighteenth century.

The use of arse as a derogatory term for a person is unequivocally dated to the late nineteenth century, but there is an interesting single use of the word from c. 1785 in poet William Blake’s unfinished manuscript An Island in the Moon. In the manuscript, Blake wrote “Ass * Arse” and then crossed that out, writing in “ass” again. The lines are a parenthetical aside to the reader, appearing after the introduction of a number of characters:

(If I have not presented you with every character in the piece
call me Ass * Arse) ass—

Michael Phillips, editor of the facsimile edition of the manuscript, notes:

Given the parenthetical address to the audience, the second instance, “Arse”, may have been intended as a pun on the Latin ars.

Ars means art, knowledge, skill. Personally, I think it looks more like Blake was initially unsure of which word to use, so he wrote both. Later he went back and chose ass, meaning a donkey. But what exactly Blake intended and why he changed his mind are matters of speculation.

Arse also has a long history of referring to the vulva and by extension a woman as an object of sexual conquest. We see this anatomical shift from back to front as early as the fourteenth century. Here’s an example from William Langland’s Piers Plowman (C-text):

For an hore of here ers-wynnynge may hardiloker tythe
Then an errant vserer,

(For a whore may more confidently tithe her arse-winnings than an errant usurer.)

Whether or not sex workers could tithe a portion of their earnings to the church was a matter of theological and popular debate at the time.

The non-equine ass is simply a variant of arse originally found in non-rhotic (i.e., r-dropping) dialects. The two forms are essentially synonymous in all senses. In the United States, ass became the dominant form, even in rhotic dialects. As a result, ass is often considered to be the American form of the word, although in recent years ass has been making inroads into British English.

Donkey is a more recent development, coming into common use because of confusion between ass and arse and the reluctance to use ass in polite circles or to put it into print. It is of unknown origin, perhaps a hypocoristic form of the name Duncan (cf. jackass and jenny-ass). It was probably in dialectal or slang use for some time prior to seeing print, which happened in the late eighteenth century. Its first appearance in print is in a slang dictionary, Grose’s 1785 Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue:

DONKEY, donkey dick, a he, or jack ass, called donkey, perhaps from Spanish, don[-]like gravity of that animal, entitled also the king of Spain’s trum[p]eter.

From this slang use, donkey eventually moved into standard English.

Discuss this post

---

Sources:

Blake, William. An Island in the Moon: A Facsimile of the Manuscript. Michael Phillips, ed. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1987, 32–33, 73. Cambridge, Fitzwilliam Museum, MS Charles Fairfax Murray 31, fol. 2r.

Crawford, S. J., ed. The Old English Version of the Heptateuch. Early English Text Society, O. S. 160. Oxford University Press: London, Gen. 12:16, 116.

Dictionary of Old English: A to Le, 2024, s.v. assa, n., assen, n., ears, n.

Godden, Malcolm and Susan Irvine. The Old English Boethius, 2 vols. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2009, 1.504 and 2.175.

Green’s Dictionary of Slang, n.d., s.v. arse, n.

Grose, Francis. A Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue. London: S. Hooper, 1785, s.v. donkey. Gale Primary Sources: Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO).

Langland, William. Piers Plowman: A New Annotated Edition of the C-text (c. 1388). Derek Pearsall, ed. Liverpool: Liverpool UP, 2014, 6.305–06, 133.

Middle English Dictionary, 2019, s.v. ars, n.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, September 2018, s.v. ass, n., ass, n.2, arse, n.; second edition, 1989, s.v. donkey, n., jenny, n.

Photo credits: Donkey: unknown photographer, 2008. Wikimedia Commons. Public domain image.

Lines from the Blake MS: Michael Phillips, 1987. Fair use of a portion of a copyrighted image to illustrate the topic under discussion.