titanium / menaccanite

A Lockheed A-12 reconnaissance aircraft which is manufactured 93% out of titanium

1 November 2024

Titanium is a chemical element with atomic number 22 and the symbol Ti. It is a lustrous, silver, transition metal with low density and high strength. It is also corrosion resistant. It is widely used in alloys for objects ranging from spacecraft to jewelry.

The element was independently discovered by Cornish minerologist William Gregor, in 1791, and German chemist Martin Klaproth, four years later. Gregor, writing in a German journal, dubbed the element and the ore in which he found it menaccanite (in German Menakanite), after Manaccan, a village and valley in Cornwall where the ore was found:

Verbunden mit den außerordentlichen Eigenschaften des Sandes, haben mich bewogen, zu glauben, daß er eine neue metallische Substanz enthalte. Um diese von andern zu unterscheiden, habe ich es gewagt, ihr einen, von der Gegend, wo sie gefunden wird (nemlich in Kirchspiele Menaccan) hergenommenen Namen zu geben, und deswegen fonnte das Metall also Menakanit gesnannt werden.

(This, together with the extraordinary properties of the sand, have led me to believe that it contains a new metallic substance. To distinguish this from others, I have ventured to give it a name taken from the place where it is found (namely in the parish of Menaccan), and therefore the metal could be called Menacanite.)

Menaccanite is still in use for the magnetic ore in which the element can be found, although as a name for the element it has been superseded by Klaproth’s name, titanium.

In 1795, Klaproth published his findings, naming the element after the titans of Greek mythology, which is in line with his early naming of uranium:

Diesem zufolge will ich den Namen für die gegenwärtige metallische Substanz, gleichergestalt wie bei dem Uranium geschehen, aus der Mythologie, und zwar von den Ursöhnen der Erde, den Titanen, entlehnen, und benenne also dieses neue Metallgeschlecht: Titanium; wovon dieses durch Sauerstoff vererzte Titanium, oder der Titankalk, die erste, vielleicht aber nicht einzige, Gattung ist.

(Accordingly, I will borrow the name for the present metallic substance, in the same way as I did with uranium, from mythology, namely from the original sons of the earth, the Titans, and thus name this new metal family: Titanium; of which this titanium ore—formed by oxygen, or titan-lime, is the first, but perhaps not the only, species.)

Unfortunately for the relatively obscure Gregor, the significance of his discovery was not immediately recognized and the more famous Klaproth’s name for the element stuck. Gregor is, however, generally recognized as having discovered it first.

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Sources:

Gregor, William. “Beobachtungen und Versuche über den Menakanit, einem in Cornwall gefundenen magnetischen Sand.” Chemische Annalen Für Die Freunde Der Naturlehre, Arzneygelahrtheit, Haushaltungskunst Und Manufakturen, 1791, vol. 1, 103–119 at 118–19. Google Books.

Klaproth, Martin Heinrich. “Chemische Untersuchung des sogenannten hungarischen rothen Schörls.” In Beiträge zur chemischen Kenntniss der Mineralkörper, vol. 1. Posen: Decker, 1795, 233–244 at 244. Google Books.

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, third edition, January 2018, s.v. titanium, n.; September 2001, menaccanite, n.

Photo credit: US Air Force, c. 1967. Wikimedia Commons. Public domain image.

acre

Farm fields in the Cotswolds, Frocester, UK

30 October 2024

Acre, the unit of land measurement, comes down to us from the Old English æcer, which inherited it from a common Germanic root. The word has cognates in other Indo-European languages too, like the Latin ager (which gives us the agri- in agriculture), the Greek ἀγρός (field), and the Sanskrit ajra (plain, open country). The modern spelling is influenced by the Norman French version of the word.

An example of Old English use of the word can be found in Ælfric of Eynsham’s Colloquy, a dialogue between a teacher and student used in teaching Latin. Beyond the linguistic value of the text, the Colloquy is useful for the view it gives into everyday life in early medieval England:

Eala, leof hlaford, þearle ic deorfe. Ic ga ut on dægræd þywende oxon to felda, & iugie hig to syl; nys hit swa stearc winter þæt ic durre lutian æt ham for ege hlafordes mines, ac geiukodan oxan, & gefæstnodon sceare & cultre mit þære syl, ælce dæg ic sceal erian fulne æcer oþþe mare.

Oh, dear master, I work too hard. I go out at dawn driving the oxen to the fields & yoke them to the plow; it is not so harsh a winter that I dare lie at home for fear of my master, but with yoked oxen, & with the plow fastened to share and coulter, each day I have to plow an entire acre or more.

A share and coulter are the blades of a plow. The Latin word in the Colloquy corresponding to æcer is ager.

Originally, an acre was defined as an area that could be plowed by a team of oxen in a day. Later, was more precisely defined in law as 1/640 of a square mile, that is 4,840 square yards or 0.405 hectares. It is still a statute measure in the United States, but its use in other anglophone countries is now customary rather than legal. The plural acres is also used to refer to an expanse of land of indeterminate size; this plural usage dates from the mid eighteenth century.

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Sources:

Ælfric. Ælfric’s Colloquy (1939). G. N. Garmonsway, ed. Exeter Medieval Texts & Studies. Exeter: U of Exeter Press, 1991, lines 23–27, 20. London, British Library, MS Cotton Tiberius A.iii, fols. 60v–64v.

Dictionary of Old English: A to Le, 2024, s.v. æcer, n.

Middle English Dictionary, 2019, s.v. aker, n.(1).

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, December 2011, s.v. acre, n.

Photo credit: Nilfanion, 2013. Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.

close, but no cigar

Still from the 1941 film Never Give a Sucker an Even Break

28 October 2024

The phrase close, but no cigar is traditionally uttered when someone falls just short of achieving a goal. The phrase comes to us from the early twentieth-century practice of giving out cigars as prizes for winning games of chance or skill at carnivals, fairs, and other attractions. The following description of the practice appears in Robert Machray’s 1902 book The Night Side of London. In the description, cigars are given out as prizes in what appears to be an early form of the game now known as Skee-Ball. As someone who spent my undergraduate summers as a boardwalk barker and operator of games of chance, I can attest to the accuracy of this description. Little has changed other than the cost of playing the game:

Another penny—and this time you accept defeat, and move on to the next stall, where another penny gives you the privilege of trying to roll three balls into certain holes with numbers attached thereunto. Should you score twenty you will win a cigar. But you do no more than score nine. Undiscouraged, or perhaps encouraged by this fact, you spend another penny, and another, and another—but you don’t get the cigar, and it is well for you that you don’t! For there are cigars and cigars. On you go, and next you try your hand at the cocoa-nuts, or the skittles, or the clay-pipes, or in the shooting-alleys. And so on and on—until your stock of pennies and patience is exhausted.

Another mention of the practice, this time with cigars being prizes for marksmanship, comes from the New York Evening World of 12 June 1905. The paper ran a contest whereby readers who managed to identify a man, “Mr. Raffles,” whose picture was published in the paper, as he went about town would win $100. The paper published after-the-fact descriptions of where Mr. Raffles had been:

Remember the young chap at the rifle range who nearly put the joint out of business winning cigars? Quite a crowd watched the sport, but all failed to grasp the fact that it was Raffles who was getting the smokers.

But the phrase close, but no cigar itself is not recorded until 28 May 1927, when it appears as a headline in the Yale Daily News of New Haven, Connecticut. The use is ironic:

Close but No Cigar

In a close and hard-fought pitchers’ battle the Sophomore delegation of Psi Upsilon defeated their classmates of Delta Kappa Epsilon, 25 to 1.

The next year it appears in a pair of articles in another Ivy League newspaper, the Daily Princetonian, the student newspaper of Princeton University in New Jersey. The first of these is from the 13 January 1928 issue:

The Triangle Club is a great institution and all that, but just the same we wish they would cut down a little on those wisecracks which are applicable to Campus life. Too many undergraduates are getting up “parties of four” to do various inane things, and just a few too many of our friends are telling us that “history will never know” that we forgot to go to Chapel Sunday. But the end of our patience will have come if Professor Cawley hands back a profusely red-inked essay with the sprightly remark, “close, but no cigar”.

The phrase seems to have been something of a catchphrase for the Princeton class of 1928, because this reunion notice for that class appears in the Princeton Alumni Weekly for 2 July 1929:

The long distance trophy, an appropriately inscribed silver cigarette case, was awarded to Em Gooch who had made the trip from Lincoln, Neb. for the occasion. Several other members came close, but no cigar, and we trust that all those in New York and Philadelphia who failed to show up, without reason, will read these lines with a quiver.

The Long Island Daily Press also had a couple of headlines that used the phrase that year, indicating that the phrase was not limited to Princeton. An 18 May 1929 article about a local Long Island man who came in second in successive elections for a local post had “Close, But No Cigar” as a sub-headline.

Then on 13 December 1929, the paper ran the a story about a local fundraising drive that included the following:

“Close—but no cigar!”

The refrain of the “knock ’em-down-and-win-a-smoke” barker still rings in the Christmas Fund Editor’s mind as he considers how close the Christmas Fund came yesterday to having a $200 day—only to miss by a scant half dollar.

So, by 1929 the phrase was well established.

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Sources:

“’28’s First.” Princeton Alumni Weekly, 29.36, 2 July 1929, 1166/2. Google Books.

“Catch the Mysterious Mr. Raffles—Worth $100 to You,” Evening World (New York), 12 June 1905, 11/4. Library of Congress: Chronicling America.

“Close but No Cigar.” Yale Daily News (New Haven, Connecticut), 28 May 1927, 2/3. Yale Daily News Historical Archive.

Daily Princetonian (Princeton, New Jersey), 13 January 1928, 2/3. NewspaperArchive.com.

“Day’s Fund Just Falls Short of Reaching $200.”  Long Island Daily Press (Jamaica, New York), 13 December 1929, 1/6. FultonHistory.com.

Goranson, Stephen. “‘close, but no cigar’ antedated (1929).” ADS-L, 18 January 2013.

Machray, Robert. The Night Side of London. Philadelphia: J. B. Lippencott, 1902, 103. Google Books.

Mullins, Bill. “‘close, but no cigar’ antedated (1929) (UNCLASSIFIED).” ADS-L, 18 January 2013.

O’Toole, Garson. “‘close, but no cigar’ antedated (1929).” ADS-L, 18 January 2013.

Oxford English Dictionary, additional sense, 2004, s.v. cigar, n.

Popik, Barry. “Close, But No Cigar.” The Big Apple (blog), 18 January 2009. BarryPopik.com.

Town Hall Joe. “Civic Gossip.” Long Island Daily Press, 18 May 1929, 16/6. FultonHistory.com.

Photo credit: Universal Pictures, 1941. Fair use of a single frame from a copyrighted motion picture to illustrate the topic under discussion.

tin

A tin of Altoid mints

25 October 2024

Tin is a chemical element with atomic number 50 and the symbol Sn, which is from the Latin name for the metal, stannum. It is a soft, easily cut, silvery metal. It has been known since antiquity and has myriad applications.

The word tin comes from a common Germanic root, with cognates found in almost all the West and North Germanic languages. The word can be found in the late ninth-century Old English translation of the Pope Gregory the Great’s Cura Pastoralis (Pastoral Care):

Ða cwæð Dryhten, “Ðiss Israhela folc is geworden nu me to sindrum ond to are ond to tine ond to iserne ond to leade inne on minum ofne”; suelce he openlice cwæde, “Ic hie wolde geclænsian mid ðæm gesode ðæs broces, ond wolde ðæt hie wurden to golde ond to seolufre, ac hie wurdon gehwierfde inne on ðam ofne to are ond to tine ond to isene ond to leade, forðæm ðe hie noldon on ðæm gesuincium hie selfe gecirran to nyttum ðingum, ac ðurhwunedon on hiera unðeawum.”

(Then the Lord said, “this nation of Israel, has now become dross to me, and to copper and to tin and to iron and to lead in my furnace”; as if his plain meaning were, “I wished to purify them with smelting of tribulation, and wished that they would turn to gold and to silver, but inside the furnace they turned to copper and to tin and to iron and to lead, because in that hardship they would not turn themselves to beneficial things, but persisted in their sins.)

In antiquity and in the Middle Ages, seven of the elemental metals were each associated with a god and with a planet, with tin associated with Jupiter. We see this association in a variety of alchemical writings, including Chaucer’s The Canon’s Yeoman’s Tale:

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!)

The use of tin to mean a sealed metal container, a can, dates to the nineteenth century, after the tin-plated iron or steel originally used to make the containers. This usage is primary British.

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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.

Fulk, R. D., ed. The Old English Pastoral Care. Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library 72. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2021, chap. 37, 282.

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. tin, n.

Photo credit: Schyler, 2010. Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.

beam me up, Scotty

Captain Kirk (William Shatner) and Mr. Spock (Leonard Nimoy) from the original Star Trek television series

23 October 2024

Beam me up, Scotty! is a slang catchphrase inspired by the original Star Trek television series (1966–69). It used as a jocular expression of a desire to be somewhere other than the present place or situation. To beam is a verb used in the series to describe the process of the starship Enterprise’s transporter, and Scotty is the ship’s chief engineer who often operated the transporter. But like many such immortalized “quotations,” it was never actually uttered on the series, although in a few instances it came close to being said. (Cf. my work here is done)

The use of to beam to denote the action of such a transporter predates Star Trek. It appears in Samuel A. Peebles, et al. 1951 A Dictionary of Science Fiction:

MATTER TRANSPORTER—In SF, an apparatus which dissembles [sic] an object, transmits it through space and re-assembles it at another point. The transported matter is usually broken into its component atoms, keyed, “beamed” and reconstructed by a specially keyed receiver. Travel is thus instantaneous.

(Peebles’s dictionary cites two sources that allegedly use beam in this sense, but neither one actually does. Beam is used to refer to a beam of light in one and to a directed-energy weapon in the other. So this dictionary entry is the earliest use found so far.)

In a Star Trek context, beam appears in the 1964 story outline creator Gene Roddenberry used to pitch the show to the networks, where it appears as an adjective:

The cruiser itself stays in space orbit, rarely lands upon a planet. Recon parties (small groups, featuring continuing characters) are set down via an energy-matter scrambler which can “materialize” them onto the planet’s surface. This requires maximum beam power and is a tremendous drain on the cruiser’s power supply. It can be done only across relatively short line-of-sight distances.

The verb appears in the 29 June 1964 first draft of the script of The Cage, which would become the pilot for the series:

The landing party is beamed to materialize on arid, rocky Sirius IV a quarter mile from the wrecked ship.

In the 1968 book The Making of Star Trek, Roddenberry is recorded as commenting:

If someone had said, “We will give you the budget to land the ship,” our stories would have started slow, much too slow. The fact that we didn’t have the budget forced us into conceiving the transporter device—“beam” them down to the planet—which allowed us to be well into the story by script page two.

As for the phrase appearing on the show, Captain Kirk uttered, “Beam us up” at the end of the episode The Gamesters of Triskelion, and he put Scotty at the head of the phrase in The Savage Curtain when he said, “Scotty, beam us up fast.” But the exact phrase, “Beam me up, Scotty” was never uttered on the show.

The phrase Beam me up, Scotty appears in print by 1976 when the 19 June issue of the Houston Chronicle has an article about Houstoncon ’76, a nostalgia convention that featured Star Trek actors and memorabilia. The article concludes:

“This is really about the seventh convention we’ve had,” Bonario says. “But, in all honesty, it’s only the third really huge one. The attendance has gone up from 125 the first year to 4,000 last year. We’re expecting about 5,000 this year.”

Tickets and detailed schedules are available at the registration table on the second floor of the hotel.

Beam me up, Scotty.

To confirm that the term was in slang use around this time, linguist Connie Eble’s Campus Slang of 4 April 1978 has this entry:

all right, Spock, beam us up!—exclamation of a need to get out of a party or any uncomfortable situation

Eble’s record has Spock rather than Scotty. While Spock rarely operated the transporter, he was often at the receiving end of communications requesting a beam up, so it’s certainly possible that early uses of the slang phrase had considerable variation before settling on a canonical form.

And the Oxford English Dictionary has a use of beam me up, Scotty in the 31 July 1984 issue of American Banker, of all places, a publication that indicates the slang phrase had become widespread by this date:

“Beam me up Scotty, there's no prospect of finance down here.” Undoubtedly, that's what Star Trek's Captain Kirk, commander of the science-fiction Starship Enterprise, would say if he came here in search of bank loans to fund extraterrestrial activities.

And the following month on 23 August 1984, we get a Usenet post by someone with the moniker Lt. Suvok, the name of a character in Star Trek fan fiction:

Beam me up,Scotty,it's millertime!!

and

Beam me up,Scotty,I'm getting some strange looks here!!

(The lack of spaces after the commas is in the original post.)

The phrase is now often seen in an extended form: Beam me up Scotty, there’s no intelligent life down here, which could be an apt description of the internet.

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Sources:

Adamson, Dale. “Big Bucks Time at Houstoncon.” Houston Chronicle, 19 June 1976, 2.1/4. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

Green’s Dictionary of Slang, n.d., s.v. beam me up, Scotty!, excl.

Historical Dictionary of Science Fiction, 2021, s.v. beam, v.

Liss, Kenneth M. Reader comment, 23 October 2024. (Pointing out the Houston Chronicle article.)

Lt. Suvak. “STIV In Search Of...Dr. Who,” Usenet: net.startrek, 23 August 1984.

Oxford English Dictionary, Additions Series, 1993, s.v. beam, v.

Peeples, Samuel A., David A. Kyle, and Martin Greenberg. “A Dictionary of Science Fiction.” In Travelers in Space. Martin Greenberg, ed. New York: Gnome Press, 1951, s.v. matter transporter, 24. Archive.org.

Roddenberry, Gene. “’The Cage’: Pilot Story Outline” (first draft, 29 June 1964). In Stephen E. Whitfield and Gene Roddenberry. The Making of Star Trek. New York: Ballantine, 1968, 48. Archive.org.

Roddenberry, Gene. “Star Trek” (story outline, 1964). In Stephen E. Whitfield and Gene Roddenberry. The Making of Star Trek. New York: Ballantine, 1968, 26. Archive.org.

Roddenberry, Gene, Arther Heinemann, and Arthur H. Singer (writers). “The Savage Curtain.” Star Trek, Herschel Daugherty (director), airdate: 7 March 1969.

Roddenberry, Gene and Margaret Armen (writers). “The Gamesters of Triskelion,” Star Trek, Gene Nelson (director), airdate: 5 January 1968.

Whitfield, Stephen E. and Gene Roddenberry. The Making of Star Trek. New York: Ballantine, 1968, 43–44. Archive.org.

Photo credit: NBC Television, c. 1966. Wikimedia Commons. Public domain image.