Transcript of “You’ve Heard of the Word “Petrichor” but Do You Know Its Story?”
Hello, you have A Way with Words.
Hello, this is Mike Miller from Madison, Wisconsin.
And my wife and I were watching Sandra Bullock as a guest on, I think, Jimmy Fallon, The Tonight Show.
And she was asked what she likes to do.
And she said, oh, you know, I love to go out and walk just before it rains or during the rain or after the rain to, you know, to get a sniff of the petrichor.
And my wife and I looked at each other and went, petrichor, you know, what in the world is that?
And so what happened is she explained what it was, you know, pretty much the scent in the air, very earthy, maybe decomposing leaves or earthworms or whatever.
And she just loved that smell.
And being an old fart, I always have to have a memory trick.
So I kept coming up with the word petrified.
I’d go outside after a rain and I’d go, now what was that word?
It was petra something.
Petrified, yeah, that was it. Petrichor. So what is the origin of petrichor?
Oh, wow. You’ve given us a beautiful description of it, Mike. It’s one of those words where you think, oh, isn’t it great that there’s a word for that, for that wonderful smell after a rain or just before a rain.
And the cool thing about it is that not only is there a word for this, but there’s a wonderful story behind it. For years, scientists referred to this smell as argillaceous odor, and that’s because this smell is particularly noticeable in the presence of soil that has a lot of whitish clay in it.
It’s known as argil, this clay. How do you spell argil? Argil is A-R-G-I-L.
Okay. It comes from a Latin word that means bright, and so it used to be called argillaceous odor. But in the early 1960s, a couple of government scientists in Melbourne, Australia, decided that they wanted to try to figure out what made this wonderful odor.
And their names are Isabel Joy Bear and Richard Thomas. And what Bear and Thomas found is that this intoxicating smell is the result of increased moisture in the air and then the pounding of raindrops on the earth’s surface.
And what happens is that it causes certain compounds to be released, a yellowish oil that’s secreted by plants and a bacteria-generated substance that’s called geosamin, G-E-O-S-M-I-N. And they combine in the air to create that smell.
And so Bear and Thomas reported their findings in 1964 in a scientific article called Nature of Argyllaceous Odor. But they pointed out in the article that this smell isn’t just limited to surfaces that have a lot of clay in it.
And so they proposed a more general term. And here’s where your Petra comes in. The word petrichor, P-E-T-R-I-C-H-O-R, comes from two Greek words.
It comes from petra, which means stone, like petrify, and the ichor in petrichor. In ancient Greek mythology, it’s the magical fluid that flows through the veins of the gods.
It’s sort of this kind of golden blood. And so they came up with this word.
They coined this word, petrichor, to mean essence of stone or something like that. So these two geochemists came up with this term.
And it’s this term that I think, you know, I just feel like when you come up with a term like that and everybody goes, that’s the term for that wonderful thing.
You know, it doesn’t make you feel more connected to other people.
Oh, yeah.
I got a good version of it.
I finished mowing my friend’s paths. His riding mower’s down.
So I was doing a number of hours, getting a good workout, pushing it up hills.
And just before it rained, you know, the rains came down and there was plenty of petrachor in there.
And I, of course, after I did all that work, I think I felt pretty petrified.
So.
All right.
Take care, Mike.
Thanks for the call.
Or you can tell us an email, words@waywordradio.org.
