poinsettia

A poinsettia plant, Curtis’s Botanical Magazine, 1836

23 December 2024

This flower (Euphorbia pulcherrima), native to Mexico and associated with Christmas, has a rather straightforward etymology. It is named after Joel Roberts Poinsett, who served as the U.S. minister (i.e., ambassador) to Mexico from 1825–30. An amateur botanist, Poinsett sent samples of the flower back to the States, and the name poinsettia had become attached to the plant by 1836. The original Latin designation was Poinsettia pulcherrima, but by the 1860s it was classified in the genus Euphorbia.

The association with Christmas began in Mexico. In Mexican Spanish the poinsettia is called flor de Noche Buena (Christmas Eve flower).

I have found a description of the plant that includes the name Poinsettia pulcherima in an article dated 10 March 1836 in the Edinburgh New Philosophical Journal.

And there is this description of the plant from later in 1836 that appeared in London’s Curtis’s Botanical Magazine:

Poinsettia Pulcherrima. Showy Poinsettia

[…]

By whom this truly splendid plant was communicated to Willdenow’s Herbarium, I am not informed, but it was discovered by Mr. Poinsette in Mexico, and sent by him to Charleston in 1828, and afterwards to Mr. Buist of Philadelphia, who has within a very few years brought together a choice collection of plants.

There are probably earlier examples of the name to be found.

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Sources:

Graham, Dr. “Description of Several New or Rare Plants Which Have Lately Flowered in the Neighbourhood of Edinburgh, Chiefly in the Royal Botanic Garden” (10 March 1836). Edinburgh New Philosophical Journal, 20.40, April 1836, 412. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, September 2006, s.v. poinsettia, n.

“Poinsettia pulcherrima. Showy Poinsettia.” Curtis’s Botanical Magazine (London), Vol. 10 New Series, 1836, 109–111 at 110. Gale Primary Sources: Nineteenth Century UK Periodicals.

Image credit: Curtis’s Botanical Magazine, 1836. Public domain Image.

zinc

Three samples of zinc, a crystalline fragment (right), a sublimed dendritic (center), and a one-centimeter cube

20 December 2024

Zinc is a chemical element with atomic number 30 and the symbol Zn. It is a brittle metal at room temperature with a shiny, gray color. Trace amounts of zinc are essential for life as we know it, and the metal is used in a wide variety of alloys.

The name comes from the German zink, but the origin of the German word is unknown. It is first recorded in the form zinken, which might be a compound of zinn (tin) + -ken (diminutive suffix), with a meaning of tin-like metal.

Zinc was known to the ancients, primarily in ores and alloys, but it was the sixteenth-century alchemist Paracelsus (Theophrastus von Hohenheim), c. 1493–1541) who first identified it as a distinct metal and recorded the name zinc in his Liber Mineralium II:

Moreover there is another metal generally unknown called zinken. It is of peculiar nature and origin; many other metals adulterate it. It can be melted, for it is generated from three fluid principles; it is not malleable. Its color is different from other metals and does not resemble other others in its growth. Its ultimate matter is not to me yet fully known. It admits no mixture and does not permit fabricationes of other metals. It stands alone entirely to itself.

Georgius Agricola also recorded the name in the 1558 edition of his Bermannus:

Eius magna copia Reichesteini, quod est in Silesia, unde mihi nuper allatum est, effoditur, multo etiam maior Raurisi misti, quod zincum nominant.

(A great quantity [of pyrite] is dug in Reichenstein, which is in Silesia, as was recently reported to me, and a much greater quantity of the Raurici alloy, which they call zinc.)

The earliest known English language use of the name is in John French’s 1651 The Art of Distillation:

About the third part of the spirit of Salt cometh over as insipid as common water, though the spirit were well rectified before, for the driness of the Lapis CalaminarisI (which is the driest of all Minerals and Metals except Zink) retaineth the spirit after the flegm is come over.

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Sources:

Agricola, Georgius. Bermannus. Basel: Johann Froben and Niclausen Bischoff, 1558, 431–62. ProQuest Early European Books.

———. De re metallica. Herbert Clark Hoover and Lou Henry Hoover, trans. London: Mining Magazine, 1912, 409n. HathiTrust Digital Archive. (Yes, that Herbert Hoover; he was better Latinist than president.)

French, John. The Art of Distillation, second edition. London: E. Cotes for Thomas Williams, 1653, 78. ProQuest: Early English Books Online (EEBO).

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, zinc, n.

Wothers, Peter. Antimony, Gold, and Jupiter’s Wolf: How the Elements Were Named. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2019, 58. ProQuest Ebook Central.

Photo credit: Heinrich Pniok, 2010. Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NonDerivative 3.0 (US) license.

merry / God rest you merry

Cover of Puck magazine for 25 December 1907; illustration by L. M. Glackens depicts John D. Rockefeller, Joseph B. Foraker, Henry H. Rogers, Edward H. Harriman, David J. Brewer, and James R. Day singing carols to Theodore Roosevelt

18 December 2024

Merry has a quite straightforward origin, although the title and first line of the Christmas carol God rest you merry, gentlemen is confusing to some. Merry comes from the Old English myrige, meaning pleasant or delightful.

When applied to people, the sense of being happy, especially when that happiness is fueled by alcohol, is in place by the latter half of the fourteenth century.

An example of the Old English can be found in Ælfric of Eynsham’s homily for the Sunday before Ash Wednesday:

Þeos woruld, þeah ðe heo myrige hwiltidum geðunt sy, nis heo hwæðere ðe geliccre ðære ecan worulde þe is sum cweartern leohtum dæge.

(This world, though it might sometimes seem merry, is more like the eternal world than a prison is like the light of day.)

But the Christmas carol God Rest You Merry, Gentlemen is frequently misinterpreted, with merry assumed to be modifying gentlemen, and reading the phrase as merry gentlemen, may God [grant] you rest/peace. But that reading puts the comma in the wrong place and fails to recognize that here the verb to rest is transitive, meaning to make someone or something remain in the specified condition, in this case a state of merriment. So the carol’s opening line actually means gentlemen, may God keep you merry. The stock phrase rest you merry dates to late thirteenth century, when it appears in one version of the romance Floris and Blancheflour. From Cambridge, University Library MS Gg. 4.27.2, lines 157–58:

So him sede child Floriz
“Rest þe murie, sire Daris.”

And Shakespeare uses the formulation twice, “Rest you merrie” in Romeo and Juliet, 1.2, and “Rest you happy” in Antony and Cleopatra, 1.1. It appears in many other places, but the Christmas carol is probably the most well-known use of the phrase.

What prompted me to write this article about a very pedestrian word origin was a 2014 article in the Baton Rouge, Louisiana Advocate about a Southwestern Louisiana University professor who claimed that merry once had a meaning of strong or mighty, and that God rest you merry meant may God keep you strong, and that merrie old England actually meant mighty old England. This is completely wrong. Merry never meant mighty or strong, and I have no idea where this professor got that idea or if the belief is more widespread.

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Sources:

Ælfric. “Quinquagesima.” The Old English Catholic Homilies, The First Series. Roy M. Liuzza, ed. Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library 86, Cambridge: Harvard UP, 186.

Floris and Blancheflour. Cambridge, University Library MS Gg. 4.27.2.

Middle English Dictionary, 2024, miri(e, adj.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, September 2001, s.v. merry, adj., merry v., merry, adv.; March 2010, rest, v.1.

“SLU Professor Reveals History Behind Famous Carols.” The Advocate (Baton Rouge, Louisiana), 17 December 2014. NewsBank: Access World News—Historical and Current.

Image Credit: Louis M. Glackens, 1907. Library of Congress. Public domain image.

reindeer

Page from the 1821 booklet The Children’s Friend

16 December 2024

Reindeer, Rangifer tarandus, are a species of deer native to the arctic and subarctic of Europe, Siberia, and North America. The word is a borrowing from the Scandinavian languages—it’s hreindýri in Old Icelandic and rendjur in Swedish. (The usual word in Swedish is simply ren, but rendjur is an older form.) The first element of reindeer is from the Germanic root rein, which is of uncertain origin, but is likely a reference to the creature’s antlers. Deer is a Germanic root meaning animal or beast, which only later specialized to mean the species of ruminant mammals. So the original, literal meaning of reindeer was likely “horned beast.”

The word makes one appearance in Old English, in an account of a voyage to Norway that is found in the translation of Orosius’s history. It is not so much an example of an Old English name for the creature as it is the use of a foreign word:

Þa deor hi hatað “hranas”; þara wæron syx stælhranas, ða beoð swyðe dyre mid Finnum, for ðæm hy foð þa wildan hranas mid.

(They call those deer “rein[deer]”; six of them were decoy-rein[deer], which are very dear to the Finns, for they catch the wild rein[deer] with them.)

The hran in this passage is an Anglicization of hrein.

This early use of the word did not catch on, however, and it doesn’t appear again in English until the fifteenth century, when it appears c. 1440 in the Alliterative Morte Arthure:

Than they roode by þat ryuer þat rynnyd so swythe,
Þare þe ryndez ouerrechez with reall bowghez;,
The roo and þe raynedere reklesse thare ronnen,,
In ranez and in rosers, to ryotte þam seluen.

(Then they rode by that river that ran so swiftly;,
There the trees reached over with stately boughs;,
There the roe deer and the reindeer ran reckless there,,
In bushes and in roses to amuse themselves.)

The shorter form rein, without the -deer, was also common in English once, but has faded from use.

The association of reindeer with Christmas and Santa Claus dates to early nineteenth century New York. It was Clement Moore’s 1823 poem “A Visit from St. Nicholas” that firmly established the eight reindeer that pulled Santa’s sleigh in the cultural consciousness, but Moore was not the first to depict a reindeer pulling Santa’s sleigh. In 1821, New York printer William Gilley published a booklet that included an anonymous poem with the lines:

Old Santeclaus with much delight,
His reindeer drives this frosty night,,
O’er chimney tops, and tracks of snow,,
To bring his yearly gifts to you.

The drawing accompanying the poem shows a single reindeer pulling Santa’s sleigh. 

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Sources:

The Alliterative Morte Arthure. New York: Burt Franklin, 1976, lines 920–23. Lincoln Cathedral 91 (Thornton Manuscript), fols. 53a-98b. Corpus of Middle English Prose and Verse. TEAMS has a version with modernized spelling and glossing that’s easier to read.

The Children’s Friend, number 3. “A New-Year’s Present, to the Little Ones from Five to Twelve,” part 3, New York: William B. Gilley, 1821, 1. Yale University, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.

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

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

Orosius. King Alfred’s Orosius, part 1. Henry Sweet, ed. Early English Text Society. London: N. Trübner, 1883, 18. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Oxford English Dictionary Online, third edition, December 2009, s. v. rein, n.2; reindeer, n.

Whipp, Deborah. “The History of Santa’s Reindeer.” Altogetherchristmas.com. n. d.

Image credit: Yale University, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. Public domain image as a mechanical reproduction of a public domain work.

yttrium

Two samples of sublimed, dendritic yttrium with a one-centimeter yttrium cube for comparison

13 December 2024

Yttrium is a chemical element with atomic number 39 and the symbol Y. It is a silvery transition metal. It is used in the production of numerous electronic devices, notably in the phosphors in LED lights and formerly in cathode-ray tubes. Yttrium is toxic, and exposure to airborne yttrium dust can cause lung disease in humans.

Yttrium was the first of several elements discovered at and named for the quarry at Ytterby, Sweden. The others being ytterbium, erbium, and terbium. It was first identified by chemist Johan Gadolin in 1794, but he did not propose a name for the element. Three years later, Anders Gustav Ekeberg confirmed the discovery and proposed the Swedish name Ytterjord and the Latin name Yttria:

Den bör då namngifvas, och dårvid tyckes vara vigaft at hafva affeende på defs första upfinningsort, emedan hvarken af upfinnarens namn, ej heller af någon jordens egenskap kan formeras en nog kort och för flere språk passande benåmning. Den kan då heta Ytterjord, på latin Yttria, hvarigenom den både i ljud och bokståfver år fri från tvetydighet och förblandning.

(It should then be named, and in that case it seems to be appropriate to refer to its first place of discovery, because neither the name of the discoverer, nor any property of the earth can be formed into a name that is sufficiently short and suitable for several languages. It can then be called Ytterjord, in Latin Yttria, whereby both in sound and letters it is free from ambiguity and confusion.)

The -ium ending was subsequently added to conform to the standard practice of naming metals.

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Sources:

Ekeberg, A. G. “Ytterligare undersökningar av den svarta stenarten frail Ytterby och den dari fundna egna jord.” Kungliga Svenska Vetenskapsakademiens Handlingar 18.2, April–June 1797, 156–164 at 163. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Gadolin, Johan. “Undersökning af en svart tung Stenart ifrån Ytterby Stenbrott I Roslagen.” Kongliga Vetenskapsakademiens Nya Handlingar, 15.2, April–June 1794, 137–55. 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. yttrium, n.