vanadium

Painting of a blond woman on a cart drawn through the clouds by two cats & surrounded by seven elves (depicted as cherubim)

“Freja Seeking Her Husband,” Nils Blommér, oil on canvas, 1852

22 November 2024

Vanadium is a chemical element with atomic number 23 and the symbol V. It is a hard, silvery-gray transition metal. It has a variety of uses, primarily in steel alloys to increase hardness.

The element was first discovered by Andrés Manuel del Río y Fernández in 1801. He initially dubbed the element panchromium (Greek παγχρώμιο, all colors), and upon finding that when heated the metal changed to a red color, he redubbed it erythronium (Greek: ερυθρός, red). But his discovery was not generally accepted at the time, and he withdrew the claim thinking he had been in error.

Nils Gabriel Sefström rediscovered the element in 1830, giving it the name vanadium after a nickname for the goddess Freya:

Nament.

Då detta var likgiltigt, valdes helst ett sådant, hvars begynnelse-bokstaf ej förekommer såsom sådan uti hittills kända enkla kroppars namn, och kallade den Vanadin, på latin Vanadium, efter Vanadis ett tillnamn åt Freija, den förnämsta gudinnan uti göthiska Mythologien.

(The Name.

As this [substance] was undifferentiated, one was preferably chosen whose initial letter does not appear as such in the names of simple bodies known so far, and called it Vanadin, in Latin Vanadium, after Vanadis, a nickname for Freija, the foremost goddess in Gothic mythology.)

Sources:

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., vanadium, n., erythronium, n.

Sefström, N. G. “Om Vanadium, en ny metall, funnen uti stångjern, som är tillverkadt af malm ifrån Taberget I Småland.” Kongl. Vetenskaps-Academiens Handlingar för år 1830. Stockholm: P. A. Norstedt & Söner, 1831, 255–261 at 258. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Image credit: Painting by Nils Blommér, 1852. Photo by Cecilia Heisser, NationalMuseum Sweden. Wikimedia Commons. Public domain image.

Lucifer

Black & white drawing of a winged angel wearing an armored breastplate and leaning against a rocky escarpment

Lucifer, by Gustave Doré, 1866, illustration for John Milton’s Paradise Lost

20 November 2024

Most people recognize Lucifer as a name for the devil, for Satan, but fewer know that it is also a name for the planet Venus. How did this rather odd double meaning come about?

The name is from the Latin lucifer, or light-bearer (luci- / lux-, light. + -fer, bearing). The Latin in turn comes from the Greek ϕωσϕόρος (phosphorus), φως- (phos-, light) + -φόρος (-phoros, bringer). Cf. phosphorus.

Both senses of Lucifer date to the Old English period. We can see it used for the planet in an eleventh-century astronomy manual compiled by a monk named Byrhtferth:

Seo sunne ys onmiddan þissum tacnum gesett, and heo geyrnð hyre ryne binnan eahta and twentigum wintrum. Þæræfter on þam circule Lucifer uparist, þæne sume uðwitan hatað Candidum; he yrnð nigon ger hys ryne. He ys Veneris gehaten.

(The sun is set amid these [zodiacal] signs, and it runs its course in twenty-eight winters. After that, Lucifer, which some philosophers call Candidum, rises up in the circle; it runs its course in nine years. It is called Venus.)

(The twenty-eight-year cycle of the sun is a reference to the Julian calendar, in which it takes that many years for leap year to cycle through all the days of the week.)

After the moon, Venus is the brightest object in the night sky, and as the “morning star,” it precedes the rising of the sun, hence it is the “light-bringer.”

And we see the name used for the devil in the late tenth-century poem known as Christ and Satan:

Wæs þæt encgel-cyn     ær genemned
Lucifer haten,    leoht-berende,
on gear-dagum     in Godes rice.
Þa he in wuldre     wrohte onstalde,
þæt he ofer-hyda     agan wolde.

(That angelic being was earlier, in the days of old in God’s kingdom, named Lucifer, light-bearer, that was before he instigated rebellion in heaven because he was willing to be possessed by pride.)

The melding of Venus and Satan is a result of a reanalysis of a passage from the Hebrew Bible, Isaiah 14:12–15. The Vulgate version of those verses read:

quomodo cecidisti de caelo lucifer qui mane oriebaris corruisti in terram qui vulnerabas gentes qui dicebas in corde tuo in caelum conscendam super astra Dei exaltabo solium meum sedebo in monte testamenti in lateribus aquilonis ascendam super altitudinem nubium ero similis Altissimo verumtamen ad infernum detraheris in profundum laci.

(How are you fallen from heaven, Lucifer, who did rise in the morning? How are you fallen to the earth, who wounded the nations? And you said in your heart, “I will ascend into heaven; I will exalt my throne above the stars of God, I will sit in the mountain of the covenant, in the sides of the north; I will ascend above the heights of the clouds; I will be like the most high.” But you shall be brought down into hell, into the depth of the pit.)

As originally written, these verses use the planet Venus as a metaphor for the king of Babylon, but under Christianity this passage was reinterpreted so as to be about Satan, tying into the extrabiblical story of the Devil leading a rebellion against God. So that is how the name for Venus became associated with the chief of the demons.

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Sources:

Byrhtferth. Byrhtferth’s Enchiridion. Peter S. Baker and Michael Lapidge, eds. Early English Text Society s.s. 18. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995, 118.

Clayton, Mary, ed. “Christ and Satan.” Old English Poems of Christ and His Saints. Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library 27. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2013, lines 365–69, 326. Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Junius 11.

“Isaias propheta 14:12–15.” Biblia sacra vulgat, fifth edition. Robert Weber and Roger Gryson, eds. Stuttgart: Deutsche Bibelgesellschaft, 1111.

Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, s.v. Lucifer, n.

Image credit: Gustave Doré, 1866. Wikimedia Commons. Public domain image.

deer

Photo of a stag, white-tailed deer

A white-tailed deer (Odocoileus virginianus)

18 November 2024

Deer can be traced back to the Old English word deor, but the word’s use in Old English was somewhat different than deer’s is today. In Old English, deor was a more general term, referring to any, usually but not necessarily undomesticated, four-legged animal, including fabulous beasts of legend. The word often carried a connotation of wildness and even ferocity, not something we today associate with Bambi. Deer is a cognate (i.e., sister word) of the modern German Tier, meaning animal.

We see this more general usage in a homily by Ælfric of Eynsham, written at the close of the tenth century:

Ne teah Crist him na to on ðisum life land ne welan, swa swa he be him sylfum cwæð, “Deor habbað hola, and fugelas habbað nest hwær hi restað, and ic næbbe hwider ic ahylde min heafod.”

(Christ did not gain land nor riches for himself in this life, just as he said about himself, “Deer have holes, and birds have nests where they rest, and I do not have anywhere I can lay down my head.”)

The meaning of deer narrowed in the Middle English period to the sense that we know today. The Normans had imported words like beast and animal into English from French, and there wasn’t a need for another word with the same meaning, so deer became more specialized, referring only to the family Cervidae, the meaning we have for the word today. We see this narrower use in Laȝamon’s Brut, a fictionalized verse history of Britain, probably written c. 1200, with a manuscript witness from c. 1275. This particular passage tells of the death of the evil King Menbriz:

Twenti ȝer he heold þis lond; þa leoden al to hærme.
& seoððen him a time com; mid teonen he wes i-funden.
þat he to wode wende. to wundre him-seoluan.
To huntien after deoren; werfore he deð þolede.
In þon wode he funde; feier ane hinde
þa hunten wenden æfter; mid muchelen heora lude.
Swa swiðe heo liððeden forð; þat þe king heom for-leas.
þat nefde he næfer enne; of alle his monnen.
He bi-com in a bæch; þer he bale funde.
vppen ane weorede; of wlfan awedde.

(Twenty years he held this land, and harmed the people,
But then a time came when he came to harm,
For he went into the woods, wandering by himself,
To hunt after deer, and thereby suffered death.
In those woods he found a fair hind,
The hunt had followed after, with their great clamor.
The king so rushed forth, that hey abandoned them,
That he had not a single one of all his men.
He came to a valley where he found death,
Among a pack of ravenous wolves.)

Sources:

Ælfric. “Quinquagesima (Sunday before Ash Wednesday).” In The Old English Catholic Homilies: The First Series. Roy M. Liuzza, ed. Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library 86. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2024, 183–99 at 192–95.

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

Laȝamon. Laȝamon’s Brut, lines 1291–1300. London, British Museum, MS Cotton Caligula A.ix. Corpus of Middle English Prose and Verse.

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

Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, s.v. deer, n.

Photo credit: Scott Bauer, US Department of Agriculture, 2005. Wikimedia Commons. Public domain image.

 

sodium

An industrial building with “Morton Salt: When it Rains it Pours” and the Morton Salt logo painted on the roof

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.