Butter of antimony, blue vitriol, flowers of zinc are terms used for centuries by alchemists, now replaced by the scientific names antimony trichloride, cupric sulfate, and powdered zinc oxide. In his delightful memoir Uncle Tungsten: Memories of a Chemical Boyhood (Bookshop|Amazon) Oliver Sacks explains how the standardization of such chemical names by the French scientist Antoine Lavoisier and others provides a better understanding of how these substances interact with others. The trade-off, however, is losing a bit of poetry along the way. Sacks is also the author of The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat. (Bookshop|Amazon) This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “Butter of Antimony, Flowers of Zinc”
You’re listening to A Way with Words, the show about language and how we use it. I’m Grant Barrett.
And I’m Martha Barnette. Butter of antimony, blue vitriol, flowers of zinc.
Aren’t those gorgeous terms, Grant?
Yes. Are these crystals?
You’re close. These are terms that were used for centuries by alchemists and scientists for various chemical compounds.
So butter of antimony is now called antimony trichloride.
Blue vitriol is cupric sulfate.
And flowers of zinc refers to powdered zinc oxide.
And I learned all of this from a wonderful book I just finished called Uncle Tungsten, Memories of a Chemical Boyhood.
It’s by Oliver Sacks, who’s the guy who’s probably more famous for the man who mistook his wife for a hat.
But this is about his childhood when he was fascinated by metals and chemical reactions and the periodic table.
And it’s also a really good introduction to basic chemistry.
But he writes in the book about how that brilliant 18th century chemist Antoine Lavassier had decided that every substance should have a name that denotes its composition and chemical character.
He’s the guy who went in there and said, we’ve got to be more systematic about this.
We’ve got to have names that indicate how these substances would react or behave in various circumstances. And Sacks writes about how he understood that, but he also missed the old names because they had a poetry.
Right. Yeah, they do have a poetry, but there’s also a mystery about them.
Yes. All the elements ending in enium or whatever just really doesn’t have a, you wouldn’t put that into a rhyme, right? You wouldn’t seem that as part of a song.
No, you wouldn’t put it into a poem, but I mean, it communicates a lot. It’s, you know, it’s doing a lot of work, the the ides and the eights and the, and the different, different suffixes and prefixes.
But I think we’ve lost something that we no longer talk about, jovial bezoar. Oh, jovial bezoar, bezoar being the,
What’s that, the, something found in the stomach of goats, kind of. Yes. I learned that from Harry Potter, as did a lot of people. Oh, really? Oh, is it in Harry Potter? Yeah, it’s meant to cure poisons, I believe. Oh, okay. Yes, yes. Now we’ve replaced jovial bezoar with bezoar to come joviale. I’m not even sure what that is. It’s some kind of substance. But I think the jovial part has to do with Jupiter somehow. It’s some alchemist term, but I don’t know. It’s not even funny. Yeah, yeah. So, you know, you lose something and you gain something when words change. Well, at least you can go back to the original sources and enjoy them for what they were.
And how is your turning lead into gold coming along?
Yeah, I’m still working on the lead to gold.
Okay.
Let me know when you succeed.
We’ll retire happy.
I assume that you’ll share the secret with me.
Of course.
We’re hoping that you, our listeners, will share your language secrets with us.
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