sodium

Morton Salt facility, Chicago

15 November 2024

Sodium is a chemical element with atomic number 11 and the symbol Na. It is a soft, silvery-white, alkali metal that is highly reactive. It’s the sixth most abundant element in the earth’s crust. Sodium has myriad uses, perhaps most familiarly in the form sodium chloride or table salt.

The name sodium comes from soda, a post-classical Latin term for a headache, and sodanum, sodium carbonate, was sometimes used to treat headaches. These Latin words appear in the sixteenth century and are borrowings of the Arabic صُدَاع (ṣudāʿ). We see soda, in the sense of headache, appearing in English in a medical text by physician Andrew Boorde from c. 1540:

And contraryly, immoderate slepe and sluggyshnes doth humecte and maketh lyght the brayne; it doth ingendre rewme and impostumes; it is euyll for the palsy, whyther it be vnyuersall or partyculer; it is euyll for the fallynge syckenes called Epilencia, Analencia, & Cathalencia, Appoplesia, Soda, with all other infyrmytyes in the heade; for it induceth and causeth oblyuyousnes; for it doth obsuske and doth obnebulate the memorye and the quyckenes of wyt.

Chemist Humphry Davy was the first to isolate sodium and identify it as an element. He did so alongside potassium in 1807. It was Davy who dubbed the element sodium:

On this idea, in naming the bases of potash and soda, it will be proper to adopt the termination which, by common consent, has been applied to other newly discovered metals, and which, though originally Latin, is now naturalized in our language.

Potasium and Sodium are the names by which I have ventured to call the two new substances: and whatever changes of theory, with regard to the composition of bodies, may hereafter take place, these terms can scarcely express an error; for they may be considered as implying simply the metals produced from potash and soda.

The symbol Na comes from the post-classical Latin natrium, meaning soda ash or sodium carbonate, is a variant of the classical Latin nitrum, which comes from the Greek νίτρον (nitron), which in turn probably comes from Egyptian, perhaps borrowed into Greek via a Semitic language. Egypt was a major source of soda ash in the ancient world, and it was used in purification and mummification rituals. The Old Egyptian ntrj means sacred or divine.

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Sources:

Boorde, Andrew. “A Compendyous Regyment or a Dyetary of Helth” (c. 1540). In The First Boke of the Introduction of Knowledge. F. J. Furnivall, ed. Early English Text Society, Extra Series 10. London: N. Trübner, 1870, 244. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Davy, Humphry. “The Bakerian Lecture, on Some New Phenomena of Chemical Changes Produced by Electricity, Particularly the Decomposition of the Fixed Alkalies” (19 November 1807). Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, 98, 1808, 1–44 at 32. DOI: 10.1098/rstl.1808.0001.

Dictionary of Medieval Latin from British Sources, 2018, s.v. soda. Brepols: Database of Latin Dictionaries.

Glossarium mediae et infimae latinitatis (Du Cange), 1887, s.v. sodanum. Brepols: Database of Latin Dictionaries.

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. sodium, n., soda, n.1., soda, n.2; third edition, December 2003, nitre | nitre, n.

Photo credit: Cosmo1976, 2013. Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.

Dreamtime / Songline

“Kangaroo Wild Cabbage, Ceremonial Spear, Possum and Bush Carrot Dreaming,” by Bessie Nakamarra Sims & Paddy Japaljarri Sims (Warlpirri People), 1992.

13 November 2024

Dreamtime and Songline are two words associated with Australian Aboriginal culture. But they are terms that have been misunderstood by Western popular culture, and the English calques are poor translations of the Aboriginal words. Tony Swain, who has studied Aboriginal religion extensively, writes:

Few topics have more allure than the Aboriginal conception of time; few have been discussed with less care. For those seeking primal wisdom, New Age englightenment or cosmic awareness, the subject has of course been irresistible. On the fringes of scholarship we encounter interpretations ranging from astounding superficiality to almost comical inventiveness.

Dreamtime is a calque of the Arrernte altjerreŋe, the Arrernte being an Aboriginal people of the Central Australia region of Northern Territory of Australia. It was originally glossed in 1896 by anthropologist Francis James Gillen as a sacred time before living memory that stretches back to creation:

The natives explain that their ancestors in the distant past (ǔlchǔrringa), which really means in the dream-times, for this is the manner in which the natives always speak of the long ago, acquired the art of “ǔrpmalla” (fire-making) from a gigantic arrunga (Macropus robustus) called Algurawarina.

The accuracy of Gillen’s translation is now generally deprecated, with the meaning of the Arrernte word being something closer to eternal or uncreated, the location of spirits and things that could be visited via a dream or vision, and it does not in its Arrernte usage denote a time period. Swain contends that the Aboriginal concept that is poorly translated as dreamtime is better understood as “abiding events” that are inextricably linked to place or location. Here is an example of dreamtime being used by an Aborigine man, recorded in 2024 by Glenys Collard and Celeste Rodríguez Louro:

Our spirits are still in the dreamtime, even to these days now, they still woulda. Now we could be anywhere, and that family spirit, or good spirit is with us wherever we go, they’ll look after us, protect us from evil. And I’ll tell you one time, we was in Yarka Reserve there, back in the 60s, you know. […] Well then dad just, he was walking from the road into the reserve, and he seen us, but he seen all the family there, but there was another person there, like a spirit, standing there with us and he was wondering who that was. When he got up closer, closer, closer, it just vanished. It was one of the old people, just looking after them. And that’s what he told me, he was—before he passed away.

Still, the anglophone usage of dreamtime tends to correspond to Gillen’s definition. Here is an example from a 1959 academic thesis:

According to the myth, the Wollunqua existed in the sacred time called the Wingara by Warramunga people. This seems to be equivalent to what the Arunta Tribe knew as the Alcheringa and what is sometimes translated the “Eternal Dreamtime” by writers dealing with the Australian aboriginal cultures. It is the time of creation, the realm of the spirit-people, and the home of the ancestors. It is also the place of dreams and visions.

So dreamtime is a good example of a word that has acquired a very different sense in translation than it had in the original.

Closely associated with the dreamtime is the concept of the songline, a set of traditional songs that describe one’s relationship to the land. Like the dreamtime, songlines relate to creation myths, but they are not just origin stories set in the distant past, having a relevance to the present and future and one’s positionality in the landscape. Here is a definition and description from a 1989 academic thesis:

The songlines: A song is both a map and direction-finder. Providing you know the song you can always find your way across the country. In theory, the whole of Australia can be read as a musical score. The Ancestors sang the world into existence. All their words for “country" are the same as the words for “line.” Aboriginals imagine their territory as an interlocking network of lines or ‘ways through.’ To feel “at home” in that contry [sic] depends upon on [sic] being able to leave it. Everyone hoped to have at least four “ways out,” along which he could travel in a crisis. The songlines do not have frontiers, only roads and “handover points.”

By spending his whole life walking and singing his Ancestor’s Songline, a man eventually became the track, the Ancestor and the song.

Both Dreamtime and Songline are good examples of terms that when translated into another language acquire a somewhat different meaning than how they are understood in the original culture.

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Sources:

Atwater, Kathryn Kellogg. The Great Wollunqua: A Study of Primitive Ritual (MA thesis). University of Chicago, 1959, 55. ProQuest Dissertations & Theses Global.

Collard, Glenys and Celeste Rodriguez Louro. “From Spark to Flame: Decolonising Linguistics and the Creation of First Nations Medial Media.” In Finex Ndhlovu and Sabelo J. Ndlovu-Gatsheni, eds. Language and Decolonisation: An Interdisciplinary Approach. London: Routledge, 2024, 207–21 at 211. DOI: 10.4324/9781003313618-14.

Gillen, Francis James. “Notes on Some Manners and Customs of the Aborigines of the McDonnell Ranges Belonging to the Arunta Tribe.” In Baldwin Spencer, ed. Report on the Work of the Horn Scientific Expedition to Central Australia, vol. 4—Anthropology. London: Dulau, 1896, 161–96 at 185. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Hilb, Vera. Travelling: The Rotational Experience of Becoming-Nomad (MA thesis). University of Toronto, 1989, 71. ProQuest Dissertations & Theses Global.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, September 2011, s.v. song line, n.; September 2012, s.v. alcheringa, n.; June 2014, s.v. dreamtime, n.

Swain, Tony. A Place for Strangers: Towards a History of Australian Aboriginal Being. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1993, 14.

Image credit: Photo by dun_deagh, 2012. Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license. Original artwork by Bessie Nakamarra Sims & Paddy Japaljarri Sims (Warlpirri People), 1992.

dismal

Cypress trees in Lake Drummond, Great Dismal Swamp National Wildlife Refuge, Virginia

11 November 2024 [Edit, 18 November: revised translation of the first quotation]

Originally a noun (and still a noun in some isolated uses), the adjective dismal comes into English, like many of our words, with the Normans, a compound formed from the Old French phrase dis mal, which in turn is from the Latin dies mali (evil days), a name for two days each month (which ones varied month to month) which were believed to be unlucky or inauspicious. They were also known as Egipcian daies, from the presumption that they were calculated by Egyptian astrologers.

We see the word in a song in Pierre de Langtoft’s Chronicle, written c. 1300. The Chronicle is primarily written in Anglo-Norman, but some of the songs are in Early Middle English. There are numerous manuscript witnesses of the work, but these particular lines are only found in one:

He loghe wil him liked,
His paclir es thurck piked,
          he wende e were liale;
Begkot an bride,
Rede him at ride
          in the dismale.

(He laughed when it pleased him; his pack was pinned closed; he thought he was full of prowess; [he] got a bridle; prepared himself for travel during the dismal.)

Some medieval writers reanalyzed the French dismal to mean dis (ten) + mal (bad things), or given the Egyptian connection, the ten plagues of Egypt recounted in Exodus. Geoffrey Chaucer did exactly that in The Book of the Duchess:

Ful evel rehersen hyt I kan;
And eke, as helpe me God withal,
I trowe hyt was in the dismal,
That was the ten woundes of Egipte—
For many a word I over-skipte
In my tale, for pure fere
Lest my wordes mysset were.

(Very poorly can I repeat it, and also, so help me God, I think it was during the dismal, that was the ten plagues of Egypt—for I skipped over many a word in my tale, out of pure fear, lest my words were poorly chosen.)

By the fifteenth century the association with the Latin dies, “days,” had been sufficiently forgotten that people started referring to them with the redundant dismal days, as in Lydgate’s Siege of Thebes, written c. 1421:

He hath pronounced in the parlement
Toforn the lordes and the president
His cleer conceyte in verray sikernesse,
Nat entryked with no doublenesse,
Her dysemol daies and her fatal houres,
Her aventurys and her sharpe shoures,
The froward soort and unhappy stoundys,
The compleyntes of her dedly woundys,
The wooful wrath and contrariousté
Of felle Mars in his cruelté,

(He has pronounced in the parliament
Before the lords and the president
His clear opinion with great certitude,
Not enveloped in duplicity,
Their dismal days and their fated hours,
Their vicissitudes and their sharp conflicts
The future fate and unhappy times,
The complaints of their deadly wounds,
The woeful wrath and hostility
Of fell Mars in his cruelty.)

By the end of the sixteenth century, the association with inauspicious days was largely forgotten, and dismal simply became associated with melancholy or sadness. Alexander Mongomerie’s The Flyting Betwixt Montgomery and Polwart, written sometime before 1598, includes dismal, as a synonym for melancholy, in a long list of evils released from Pandora’s box:

The frencie, the fluxes, the fyk, and the felt,
The feavers, the fearcie, with the speinʒie flees,
The doyt, and the dismall, indifferently delt,
The powlings, the palsay, with pocks like pees.

And also at this time, dismal started being used adjectivally to refer to misfortune or disaster not associated with the Egyptian days. William Shakespeare uses it this way in Romeo and Juliet. In the 1597 “bad quarto” of the play, upon hearing that Romeo has killed Tybalt, Juliet says:

This torture should be roard in dismall hell.
Can heauens be so enuious?

In the 1599 quarto and in the 1623 First Folio, those lines are rendered as:

What diuell art thou that dost torment me thus?
This torture should be rored in dismall hell.

And in those later versions of the play, Juliet again uses the word in the tomb before drinking the sleeping draught:

Ile call them backe againe to comfort me.
Nurse, what should she do here?
My dismall sceane I needs must act alone.
Come Violl, what if this mixture do not worke at all?

That’s how a medieval belief in unlucky days came to mean cheerless and depressing.

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Sources:

Anglo-Norman Dictionary, 2007, s.v. dismol, n.

Chaucer, Geoffrey. “The Book of the Duchess.” The Riverside Chaucer, third edition. Larry D. Benson, ed. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987, 344–45, lines 1204–10.

Lydgate, John. The Siege of Thebes, Tercia Pars. Robert R. Edwards, ed. TEAMS Middle English Texts. Rochester: U of Rochester, 2001, lines 2889–98. Robbins Library Digital Projects.

Middle English Dictionary, 2019, s.v. dismal, n. & adj.

Montgomerie, Alexander. The Flyting Betwixt Montgomery and Polwart (before 1598). Edinburgh: Andro Hart, 1621, sig. B2r. ProQuest: Early English Books Online (EEBO).

Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, s.v. dismal, n. and adj., Egyptian, adj. & n. 

Shakespeare, William. An Excellent Conceited Tragedie of Romeo and Iuliet (Quarto 1). London: John Danter, 1597, sig. F3.r. ProQuest: Early English Books Online.

———. The Most Excellent and Lamentable Tragedie of Romeo and Juliet (Quarto 2). London: Thomas Creede for Cuthbert Burby, 1599, sig. G2r, Kr. ProQuest Early English Books Online.

———. The Tragedie of Romeo and Iuliet. In Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies (First Folio). London: Isaac Jaggard and Ed. Blount, 1623, 3.66/1, 3.72/1. Folger Shakespeare Library.

Wright, Thomas, ed. The Political Songs of England from the Reign of John to that of Edward II. Camden Society. London: John Bowyer Nichols and son, 1839, 303. Cambridge, University Library MS Gg.1.1. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Photo credit: Rebecca Wynn / US Fish and Wildlife Service, 2006. Wikimedia Commons. Public domain photo.

tungsten / wolfram

Hungarian advertisement for tungsten-filament light bulbs, c. 1910

8 November 2024

Tungsten is a chemical element with atomic number 74 and the symbol W. It is also known as Wolfram. While it was known through its ores much earlier, chemist Carl Wilhelm Scheele was the first to identify it as a distinct element in 1781. Tungsten has a wide variety of uses, but the most prominent is as a component in alloys making them harder. It is also used to make the filaments in incandescent light bulbs, but that use is declining with the introduction of LED lighting.

Both names predate Scheele’s identification of the element, being used for the ores in which it is found. The name tungsten is a borrowing from the Swedish, tung (heavy) + sten (stone). It’s first known use in English is in a 1770 translation of Swedish minerologist Axel Fredric Cronstedt’s An Essay Towards a System of Minerology:

Calx of iron, united with another unknown earth, Ferrum calciforme terrâ quâdam incognitâ intimè mixtum. The Tungsten of the Swedes.

Wolfram is recorded in the sixteenth century and is probably from German miners’ jargon wolf (wolf) + rahm (cream, foam). Minerologist Georgius Agricola proffered a reason for this name, saying the ore resembled that of the ore in which white lead could be found, but did not contain that metal, as if a wolf had devoured it. Agricola, writing in Latin, used lupi spumam, the translation of the German term:

Quinetiam niger quidam lapis inuenitur prorsus colore similis illi ex quo coflatur candidum plumbum: sed adeo leuis, ut mox intelligas inanem esse, & in se habere nullum metallum, hunc nostri appellant lupi spumam.

(A certain black stone is found with exactly the same color as that from which white lead is forged: but so light that you soon understand that it is empty, and that it has no metal in it, this is called by us wolf’s foam.)

Wolfram appears in English by 1741, when it is referenced in John Andrew Cramer’s Elements of the Art of Assaying Metals:

There is also, but especially in tin-Mines, a kind of striated Ore, made of Filaments of an irregular Texture, and dark coloured, which, when scraped, appears sometimes of a dark red Colour: it is ponderous enough, and likewise contains Iron, but it is at the same Time very arsenical; on which Account it is always rejected by Metallurgists, as being very prejudicial. The Germans call it Woolfram.

Both tungsten and wolfram were in widespread use in the scientific literature until 1950, when the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC) made tungsten the standard term. IUPAC, however, retained W as the element’s symbol.

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Sources:

Agricola, Georgius. “De natura fossilium.” In Georgii Agricolae, Basil: Froben, 1546, 260. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Cramer, John Andrew. Elements of the Art of Assaying Metals. London: Thomas Woodward and C. Davis, 1741, 139. Gale Primary Sources: Eighteenth Century Collections Online.

Cronstedt, Axel Fredric. An Essay Towards a System of Minerology. Gustav von Engestrom, trans. Emanuel Mendes Da Costa, ed. London: Edward and Charles Dilly, 1770, 201. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

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. tungsten, n., wolfram, n.

Image credit: Géza Faragó, c. 1910. Wikimedia Commons. Public domain image.

armistice / Armistice Day

Celebration of the end of World War I, Philadelphia, 11 November 1918

6 November 2024

An armistice is a formal suspension of hostilities. In early use, the word was used to refer to a ceasefire or short truce, and later it came to refer to the end of all hostilities between warring nations prior to negotiating a formal peace treaty. The English word is a borrowing from the French, which takes it from the post-classical Latin armistitium formed from arma (arms) + stit (past participle of sistere, to stand still, stop).

The earliest recorded use of armistice in English is in a 1677 account of the Danish siege of Malmö, Sweden in that year:

In the Afternoon the Enemy did desire a Truce, for to bury the Dead, which our Governour, for that time, for certain and important reasons, did refuse to grant. The next following Day, viz. the 27th ditto, they again desired an Armistice for to bury their Dead, which then accordingly upon certain Conditions was granted.

11 November 1918, the day World War I ended, was dubbed Armistice Day, and it quickly became a national holiday in most of the Allied nations. Here is an account of a suggestion for that holiday in the United States in the Omaha, Nebraska Evening World-Herald of 12 November 1918, a proposal to combine the Thanksgiving and end-of-the-war remembrances. Needless to say, this particular proposal was not adopted, and November has two national holidays in the United States:

“There is sure to be some holiday growing out of this war, and why not make it one in the month instead of two?”

“Monday was the greatest day the country ever saw,” said “Old Man” Johnson, manager of the Gayety theater, this morning. “So I wired President Wilson, suggesting that he set aside November 11 as a national holiday, and calling it ‘Armistice Day.’”

Commemoration of the end of the First World War continues to be celebrated in many countries, although the name changed following the Second World War and the day rededicated to those who died in all wars, not just WWI. In Britain and the Commonwealth, the holiday is generally known as Remembrance Day. In the United States since 1954 has been known as Veterans Day and has been rededicated to living veterans; the US already had Memorial Day, celebrated in May, which started to be celebrated in the aftermath of the Civil War.

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Sources:

“Omahan Suggests November 11 as National Holiday.” Evening World-Herald (Omaha, Nebraska), 12 November 1918, 1/2. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, June 2014, s.v. armistice, n., Armistice Day, n.; June 2017, s.v. Veterans Day, n.; December 2009, s.v. Remembrance Day, n.

A Relation of the Siege Laid and Raised Again Before Malmoo. London: 1677, 7. ProQuest: Early English Books Online.

Photo credit: Library Company of Philadelphia, 1918. Wikimedia Commons. Public domain image.