Re the age of alchemy:
Many authors chide the reader,
telling him that, if he uses common mercury, he will be wasting his time; instead he should use ‘the mercury of
the philosophers’, our ‘our mercury’.
-- M. P. Crosland, Historical
Studies in the Language of Chemistry (1962; 21978), p. 26
There is a curious contemporary parallel to this, in the
terrorists’ will-o’-the-wisp “red mercury”, a mythical WMD.
More on Renaissance cover-terms -- alchemical COMSEC:
There were many cases where the
name of a substance … was definitely misleading, by falsely suggesting its
composition. For example, the term
cinnabar of antimony suggests a compound
of antimony, whereas the name was applied to red mercuric sulphide, prepared
from antimony sulphide and mercuric chloride.
-- M. P. Crosland, Historical
Studies in the Language of Chemistry (1962; 21978), p. 88
Oh, how valuable would the relevant Wikipedia page been back in the olden days.
ReplyDeleteOur colleague Abu-Ramadi (USA), back in the day in the Land of the Two Tributaries, was handed a shovel by some officer, and told to go out at random and dig for red mercury. He was not given a description of how to recognize it as such were he to find any.
DeleteYour tax dollars at work.