The majority of chemical elements have names ending in “-ium”. In British English, we also have “aluminium” as opposed to the American “aluminum”, but we also have “tantalum” and “platinum”, so oddly the usual “-ium” ending has a couple of exceptions, as is common with spelling, grammar and word formations. The periodic table generally shows the order of discovery in how the names are formed. The older elements tend to have less regularly-formed names such as “phosphorus” and “antimony”, then after a certain point several half-hearted attempts to regularise them (e.g. “hydrogen”, “nitrogen”, “oxygen”) ensued, but it’s all rather haphazard.
The individual groups sometimes have some kind of order imposed on them. All the halogens, even the transuranic tennessine, end in “-ine” and no other element does. All the noble gases except helium end in “-on”, but this is rather spoilt by the names “carbon” and “silicon”. In a way, it makes sense that helium should have a different ending because it isn’t a typical noble gas, having only two electrons in its sole orbital as opposed to eight, as the others have. Incidentally, the noble gases are easy to contemplate in physical terms because they all consist straightforwardly of single atoms with regularly increasing weight. Oganesson, which is a transuranic noble “gas”, has a melting point of 52°C, but it can’t really exist in bulk. It would, I’m guessing, be a non-metal and therefore an oddity being so heavy and yet not a metal.
There have been two systems of nomenclature for elements which are either not yet discovered or unfamiliar. One of them imposed Sanskrit numeral prefixes, though only “eka-” and “dvi-“, i.e. one and two. This was where there were gaps in the periodic table, so for example gallium was originally called “ekaäluminium”, or perhaps “ekaäluminum” because the predicted metal hadn’t been discovered yet. This system is obsolete as all the holes in this portion of the table have now been filled. There is also the issue of what happens towards the end of the periodic table, where new elements have been discovered on a semi-regular basis. This system uses Greek and Latin numerals as prefixes for “-ium”, as in “ununoctium” for oganesson, but the numbers are chosen so as not to produce ambiguous abbreviations. They consist of the atomic number in decimal and yield three-letter symbols rather than the more usual two- or one-letter ones, which makes sense because these elements don’t meaningfully participate in chemistry owing to their instability. It would of course be possible to name all the elements in this way, producing a word like “nulnulhexium”, or possibly just “hexium”, for carbon, and “septoctium” for platinum, but this is unnecessary. One thing which somewhat bothers me about these names is that they use the decimal base rather than something which seems more fundamental such as hexadecimal or binary, or perhaps a base which matches the length of the sequences in the periodic table itself, which would give the elements systematic names matching their groups. They’re not as neat as they might villa .
The ending “-um” is clearly straightforwardly from the Latin neuter second declension, and there are also the “-on” endings from the same Greek declension. It seems to have connotations of “inanimate thing” in this context, so for example gallium is “Gaul thing”, i.e. the thing named after the country of France. There doesn’t seem to have been the kind of drive to neutrality which exists in astronomical naming. For instance, the constellation Scutum used to be called Scutum Sobieskii, but the second part was dropped, I presume because it refers to Poland, but polonium is still called that. This location naming business has led to the Swedish village of Ytterby, population 3 000, giving its name to no fewer than four elements (ytterbium, terbium, yttrium and erbium) due to the discovery of a dark, heavy rock in the area. Other elements are named after Stockholm and Scandinavia in their own way (holmium and thulium) for the same reason, and there’s also scandium. This seems disproportionate.
You will be aware though that the majority of elements ending in “-um” have an I before that ending, so the question arises of why there are exceptions. Aluminium is the oddest one of these because it varies according to American and British usage. The metal was discovered by Humphry Davy by electrolysis from alumina, which is aluminium oxide, and he originally called it “alumium”. In 1812, he changed the name to “aluminum” but this was difficult to maintain because of its lack of conformity. It got adopted by the general public in the US but not by American chemists, whilst in the Commonwealth it was uniformly “aluminium”. Canada, though, uses “aluminum”, as it’s generally more American than the rest of the Commonwealth, and also more American than Ireland come to think of it. The International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC) recommends “aluminium”.
Even so, there are four other elements like this, namely molybdenum, lanthanum, tantalum and platinum, and these always use that form. All of the other “-iums” always use that form too. Platinum was the first element to be given a name ending in “-um” officially after discovery, so it could be that the convention of inserting an I was yet to be established. All of the elements discovered prior to it ending in “-um” in Latin have no I: plumbum, aurum, argentum, ferrum, hydrargyrum. However, “zinc” is cadmiæ. Hence there are two other questions. Firstly, why did they start sticking an I in in the first place? Following that, why are there later discoveries without an I? Molybdenum was discovered before they started putting it in, and the first one with an I is tellurium. Tantalum was named long after it was discovered and lanthanum was discovered quite late. It’s distinctive in that like actinium it’s the name of a whole series of similar elements. Tantalum is presumably called that because Tantalus wasn’t called “Tantalius”.
Hence it does make sense, historically, that platinum has no I. Platinum has strong symbolic value compared to the other platinum metals, which are relatively obscure, being used, of course, for the platinum anniversaries and the jubilee, the only one in the history of any of the home nations, so it’s appropriately rare. It also turns up in platinum discs and platinum blond hair. There is, however, no “Platinum Age” or a platinum medal. The latter is easy to understand, since it would involve disrupting an established system and render previous gold medals invalid, and the older version of the age system was thought up before platinum was known in the Old World. It was, however, known in the New, being found in river deposits in South America before the Christian Era. It’s one of the densest and least reactive metals, has a very high melting point and is very hard. In spite of all these qualities, pre-Columbian artifacts made of platinum do exist, such as a mask and jewellery, occurring in present day Columbia and Ecuador.
Platinum is actually the most widespread platinum metal. Osmium and iridium, the heaviest elements of all, are not widely found on the surfaces of planets because they sink to the centre during their worlds’ molten phases. However, being an even-numbered element, platinum is more abundant than some of the others by virtue of that alone. Palladium is considerably rarer and osmium and iridium are mainly associated with their density rather than their use as precious metals. Osmium is the rarest precious metal of all, and also the densest, and is used in alloys to make pen nibs and in electron microscopy. It slowly oxidises in air and the fumes it gives off can cause blindness and lung damage. Iridium is well-known as the sign that non-avian dinosaurs were wiped out by the Chicxulub Impactor, as small celestial objects do not exhibit the stratification of larger ones due to their low gravity and often low temperature. Ruthenium, rhodium and rhenium are also platinum metals. They’re all useful as catalysts, famously in the case of platinum itself. The anticancer drug cisplatin contains it, and works like most anticancer drugs by interfering with DNA replication.
It may be just me, but I consider platinum blond hair as gendered in this culture. I’ve never been a fan of fair hair, on me or others, in æsthetic terms, but the technique for producing the effect is academically interesting.
Of course, the reason I’ve chosen to blog about this today is the fact that it’s the Jubilee, but I wanted to do so in a way which didn’t partake of any controversy between royalist and republican sentiments, so here it is.
A Box Of Chocolates 