Elementary Etymology
BY ALPER ÖZKAN (MSN/PhD I)
d_ozkan@ug.bilkent.edu.tr
I've just made a list of all the tasks I have to complete by the beginning of December and found that I'm left with a couple of grant proposals, no less than three exams, a three-day test and the associated paper, a couple of other experiments, the Bilkent News column and literature searches on a pair of completely unrelated topics, one of which involves turning insects into cyborgs for reasons I cannot discern. As if constituting some 90 percent of animal biodiversity wasn't enough for insects! I look forward to our six-legged robot overlords.
To make a long story short, I am in despair and probably will be for the next six days, as it'll take a miracle or two to survive into December. But despair won't help me write a column, so let's get down to business.
Many biology students are adherents of the Biologist's Periodic Table, which includes only hydrogen, carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, sulfur, phosphorus, calcium and the general category "trace metals." All other elements are labeled "worthless" or "toxic," so this is a very convenient table to go by. But there are a bunch of other elements out there, with unusual properties (did you know that liquid helium crawls up walls?) and still more unusual names, and this column will be about those whose names are associated with peculiar stories.
Cobalt is one such element. Long known by miners as a blue-tinged ore that gave off toxic fumes when smelted, this metal received its name from a goblin called the kobold. Thought to move and breathe in solid rock as easily as we breathe in air, kobolds were small, impish spirits of the mines who preferred to leave humans alone as long as they weren't angered. But, when their ire was drawn, they were believed to cause cave-ins and to replace valuable metals with their worthless kobold ore. (I believe I mentioned the kobold, alongside its cousins the knocker and the bluecap, in an earlier column.) As it turns out, the "kobold ore" contained a new metal that we are all familiar with by now, and the miner goblins were honored by having their name given to it.
Lead is another example, though what is curious about this metal is not how it came to earn its name, but how other names were derived from it. Known from antiquity, the element is famous for its confusing symbol Pb - in fact short for plumbum, which was what the Romans called it (to be precise, it was apparently plumbum nigrum that was lead, while plumbum candidum is what we now call tin). While we now know lead to be toxic, the Romans were apparently quite fond of it and made extensive use of the metal, crafting their tableware out of it and even using it as a sweetener -- since lead (II) acetate tastes sweet, it was regularly used to alter the taste of wine. (And people wonder why so many Roman emperors were insane.) It was also used very frequently in constructing plumbing -- so frequently, in fact, that this system of pipes and drains, and the associated occupation, now bear derivations of lead's Latin name!
Since I'm reaching the word limit allotted to me for the week, let us meld together the closing words with the Turkish name of the element nitrogen, azot. I had long thought that it was derived from azoth, the alchemical ultimate solvent in which all substances could be dissolved, and a panacea that could remedy any illness (well, that's a tautology - a panacea by definition cures all ills!). As it turns out, this is not the case - azot comes from the French word for nitrogen, azote, derived from the Greek words for "without" and "life," as Antoine Lavoisier correctly deduced that it was not the gas that sustains life. In any case, Wikipedia has a complete list detailing how each element's name has been derived, and I strongly encourage you to take a look!