mercury / quicksilver Mercury is a chemical element with atomic number 80 and the symbol Hg. It is the only metallic element that is liquid at standard temperature and pressure. (Elemental bromine is also a liquid, but not a metal.) Mercury has a wide variety of uses, ranging from thermometers to fluorescent lighting
Newsletter superb-owl The NFL championship game is sometimes jocularly referred to as the Superb Owl. Tracing exactly who came up with the coinage is impossible—it was probably independently coined multiple times. The official name of the game, Super Bowl, was coined in 1966. Officially, the name is two words, but is
bowl / Super Bowl With every new year comes the onslaught of bowl games: the Sugar Bowl, the Cotton Bowl, the Rose Bowl, the Fiesta Bowl, the Aloha Bowl, and of course the Super Bowl. Why do we call these gridiron football contests bowls? The word bowl is an old one, and the most
Newsletter America The continents of North and South America are named for Amerigo Vespucci (1451–1512). Vespucci made at least two voyages to the New World, one in 1499–1500 and another in 1501–02. He is alleged to have made two others, one before and one after the known voyages, but
Newsletter manganese Beginning chemistry students frequently confuse manganese and magnesium, but the confusion is nothing new. The two were routinely conflated by even the best chemists until the late eighteenth century. Manganese is a chemical element with atomic number 25 and the symbol Mn. It is a hard, brittle, silvery metal with
Africa The name of Africa, the second largest continent in both size and population, comes from the Latin Africanus. The Latin name, in turn, probably comes from Ifran, the name of a people in what is now Tunisia and eastern Algeria, ancestors of the modern Amazigh (Berber) people. Various origins for
Europe The toponym Europe is widely claimed to come from ancient Greek Εὐρώπη (Europé), the name of a Phoenician princess of Tyre who was abducted by Zeus in the form a bull. The tale dates to the Mycenaean period (1750–1050 BCE). Variations of the tale as to exactly who Europa
Newsletter genocide / ethnocide / cultural genocide Genocide is a rare case of a word where we know exactly who coined it and when. It is also an example of the not-so-rare case where the legal definition of a term is narrower than the general conception of what the term means. Legal or technical definitions are frequently
Newsletter Asia The origin of Asia, the name of the largest continent, is uncertain. It could from the Hittite name for a land in what is now eastern Anatolia (i.e., Turkey); there is a c.1235 BCE reference to a Hittite victory over the land of Assuva or Asuwa. And Herodotus,
Newsletter hootchy-kootchy An 1890s version of the strip-tease, with the ratio of strip to tease varying with the venue
