Category: Naming Things

JF Ptak Science Books    Quick Post                                                                

It is interesting to think about the newness of old things, particularly English words that we have in use every day.  In this case I’m referring to words in the sciences–and not necessarily the words coming in the 20th century following the explosion of modernity beginning in 1895.  It is surprising sometimes to realize the relative newness of some terms, like, for example, “scientist”. The word “science” is very old and very old in English, but the word “scientist” is coined only in 1833. It is surprising to think of the modernity of some of the words when by their constant use they seem as though they must be ancient, but of course are not so.

Here’s a quick lising of some interesting candidates, everyday words with a not-very-old lineage, their dates taken from first-usages identified by the Oxford English Dictionary:

Altimeter, 1847; Ampere, 1861; Aphasia, 1867;

Bacterium, 1847; Biology, 1802;

Cambrian , 1836; Centigrade, 1812; Chlorophyll, 1810; Chromosome, 1890; Claustrophobia, 1879; Cosmology, 1730; Cretacious, 1832;

Diatom, 1854;

Electron, 1891; Embryology; 1859; Ethnology, 1842;

Gastritis, 1806; Gynaecology, 1847;

Histology, 1847;

Joule, 1882; Jurassic, 1833;

Kleptomania, 1830;

Morphology, 1830;

Ohm, 1861;

Palaeobotany, 1872; Palaeography, 1822; Palaeolithic, 1865; Palaeontology, 1838; Petrology, 1811; Pilocene, 1833;

Scientist, 1833; Symbiosis, 1877; Synthesis, 1804;

Taxonomy, 1828; Triassic , 1841;

Voltmeter, 1882;

Watt, 1882.

JF Ptak Science Books  Post 2175

I always thought that the word “scientist” came to us from William Whewell in his Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences (volume 1, page 113) in 1840, the group of people dedicated intrepid seekers of standards and anomalies finally receiving a short and concise (if three-syllable) name for what it is they are (for even in death a scientist is still a scientist, no past tense there, like a Marine): once one, always one.  

“We need very much a name to describe a cultivator of science in general. I should incline to call him a Scientist.”

But I notice that an anonymous note in the Quarterly Review peeks its head under the tent, using the word six years earlier in 1834, though not favorably:

“Science..loses all traces of unity. A curious illustration of this result may be observed in the want of any name by which we can designate the students of the knowledge of the material world collectively. We are informed that this difficulty was felt very oppressively by the members of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, at their meetings..in the last three summers… Philosophers was felt to be too wide and too lofty a term,..; savans was rather assuming,..; some ingenious gentleman proposed that, by analogy with artist, they might form scientist, and added that there could be no scruple in making free with this termination when we have such words as sciolist, economist, and atheist—but this was not generally palatable.”–Quarterly Review, volume 51, page 59, via the Oxford English Dictionary 

JF Ptak Science Books 

There have been many Kings of the Hoboes, and Emperor of the Hoboes, in the history of American Hobodom.  The most widely recognized of all this royalty is, probably, Mr. Jeff Davis, who was elected King of Hoboes each year from 1908 to 1935–in that year at the Pittsburgh meeting of the annual “Hoboes of America” his minions gave up elected him King for Life. Of hoboes, that is, the Knights of the Road.  Davis was also a real hobo, unlike the pretenders and throne-seekers, who in general were not. (Nels Anderson, in his Men On The Move, written just as the Depression was broken, (1940) observed: “Whatever else may be said of King Jeff, his romanticizing the hobo is not without a basis in reality, and his poetic interest in the species arose from experience. But King Jeff has placed on a pedestal a man who belongs to the past. The hobo belongs with the pre-Hollywood cowboy and the lumberjacks of the Paul Bunyan legends.”)

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 2096

In the history of words and the history of writing them, the history of writing down what words mean came relatively late in the word game.  The first dictionary for the English language is difficult to establish–it wasn’t Dr. Johnson’s 1746 effort, as fabulous as it was.  There were more than a hundred earlier efforts, the earliest of which may be Robert Cowdry’s A Table Alphabeticall… as the first English dictionary, which was written in 1604. (Its more easy to determine the first American dictionary, Dr. Webster’s, 1828 .) It may be that dictionaries and assemblies of rogue/thieves language appeared well before Johnson, by perhaps as much as 175 years, providing the good readers and listeners in England with a ready tool for understanding “non-standard” (slang) words of the English language (with A New Dictionary of the Terms Ancient and Modern of the Canting Crew, by “B.E.”, being the best known of these early works, published in 1698.)

 It is interesting to me that in addition to Johnson et al another  writer–or rather set of writers–were responsible for the first Johnsonian-first dictionary in German, the  Deutsches Wörterbuch by the Brothers Grimm.  These are good examples of modernity, though there are earlier examples for other languages–Petrus de Alingio’s manuscript of 1286 and the Catholicon as the first printed alphabetical listing of Latin words appeared very shortly after Gutenberg’s Bible did on the same press.  But then these were both many centuries into the use of the language.

{More detail in the “continue reading section”, below; also, the original is available for purchase from our blog bookstore.]
And this just to say how much I like the road to words–especially when they come from unexpected places. One fine example of this is the directive below, issued by the headquarters of th Allied Control Commission (“APO No 394″) in Rome in the summer of 1944.  (This would actually be the American arm of the ACC, which was commission set up by the Allied Powers to deal with the administration of defeated countries at the end of the war.  Three weeks after D-Day the end of the war was in sight (Bastogne and Co. not withstanding), though far more so in Italy than just about anywhere else, and so the implementation of governing and occupying plans needed to be established.  One of the primary features here was to ensure that the old Fascists not be included in the new Italian governments (along the lines of denazification in Germany, which had a more laissez-faire approach to defining Nazis, especially wealthy and useful ones), and the primary issue in finding and excluding Fascists was to define what was meant by “fascist”¹.  These are those working guidelines, at least on 25 June 1944.