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Today's xkcd:

Mouseover title: "Can you pass the nackle?"

As Wikipedia explains, HCOOH is formic acid, and CH3COOH is acetic acid (i.e. vinegar).

As background for these jokes, it's worth considering that modern chemical nomenclature was linguistically inspired:

Lavoisier, together with Louis-Bernard Guyton de Morveau, Claude-Louis Berthollet, and Antoine François de Fourcroy, submitted a new program for the reforms of chemical nomenclature to the academy in 1787, for there was virtually no rational system of chemical nomenclature at this time. […]

The total effect of the new nomenclature can be gauged by comparing the new name "copper sulfate" with the old term "vitriol of Venus." Lavoisier's new nomenclature spread throughout Europe and to the United States and became common use in the field of chemistry.

Or the new names "ethanoic acid" or"acetic acid" (or CH3COOH) for the old name "vinegar"…

The full proposal was published in 1787 as Méthode de nomenclature chimique (facsimile on Gallica here, on Google here). It starts with Le Mémoire sur la nécessité de réformer et de perfectionner la nomenclature de la chimie, which was written and read to the Académie by Lavoisier on April 18, 1787, and argues that the chemical nomenclature inherited from the alchemists should be methodically revised to make the names reflect the (recently discovered) components of the named substances.

Lavoisier's argument is explicitly founded on an argument from Condillac's Logique about the role of language in developing ideas about the nature of the world. As Lavoisier put it, in a passage from that 1787 Mémoire that I quoted (without translating) in Linguistic purity? (6/13/2008):

The purpose of languages ​​is not only, as is commonly believed, to express ideas and images through signs; they are, in addition, true analytical methods, with the help of which we proceed from the known to the unknown, and, up to a certain point, in the manner of mathematicians; let us try to develop this idea.

Algebra is the analytical method par excellence; it was imagined to facilitate the operations of the mind, to shorten the course of reasoning, to compress into a small number of lines what would have required a large number of pages of discussions, finally to arrive in a more convenient, quicker, and more certain way to the solution of very complicated questions. But a moment's reflection makes it easy to see that algebra is a real language; like all languages, it has its representative signs, its method, its grammar, if we may use this expression. Thus an analytical method is a language; a language is an analytical method, and these two expressions are, in a certain sense, synonyms.

This truth was developed with infinite accuracy and clarity in the Logic of the Abbé de Condillac, a work that young people who intend to study the sciences cannot read too much, and from which we cannot refrain from borrowing some ideas. He showed how algebraic language could be translated into common language and vice versa; how the movement of the mind was the same in both cases; how the art of reasoning was the art of analysis.

But if languages ​​are true instruments that men have formed to facilitate the operations of their minds, it is important that these instruments be the best possible, and it is truly working for the advancement of the sciences to strive to perfect them.

January 21, 2025 @ 1:16 pm · Filed by Mark Liberman under Linguistics in the comics

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