You're listening to away with words, the shout out language, and how we use it, I'm Grant Barrett.

And I'm Martha Barnett, 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 my 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 in 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 his

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 inium 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 theides 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 Beesor. Oh, Jovial Beesor,

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