Mind Your Language

27 June 2009

Dot Wordsworth on words

The Queen has had a vegetable garden laid out behind Buckingham Palace. ‘No chemicals are used and the plot is irrigated from the palace borehole,’ reported the Sunday Times. This use of chemicals annoys some people, mostly chemists. By chemists, of course, I do not mean pharmacists, whom I normally do call chemists, to their annoyance. Fortunately I can distinguish between physicists and physicians, though I usually call the latter doctors, like my husband, even if many of them hold no doctorate, in medicine or anything else.

I mean to suggest by these remarks about chemists and doctors that words do not always mean what we would like them to, or what they once meant. Thus the earlier use of the word chemicals, in the 17th and 18th centuries, often referred to medicines. In the 19th century, the connotation ‘harmful substances’ emerged, normally those of an artificial nature. ‘The baker must throw in a large quantity of alum and other chemicals,’ remarked a magazine writer in 1854, at a period when there was widespread discussion of the food adulteration. There grew up a dichotomy between natural and chemical ingredients, and this persists today.

In parallel, the term chemical agriculture or chemical farming developed from an 18th-century meaning of ‘farming with artificial fertilisers’ to a generally pejorative term in the late 20th-century implying the harmful use of fertilisers and pesticides.

Of course organic compounds are chemicals too. But organic developed a life of its own too. The earliest citation of the sense ‘a method of farming or gardening’, included in this year’s revision of the OED entry for organic, dates from 1942. the quotation opposes the organic to the use of ‘poisonous sprays’. Thus organic can currently mean both a kind of chemical compound and a natural product that is different from a nasty poisonous chemical.

In denoting medicine physic overlapped with chemical, and for centuries physics simultaneously meant ‘natural science’ and the study of medicine. When it comes to apothecaries, the OED becomes quite chatty, noting that ‘from about 1700 apothecaries gradually took a place as general medical practitioners, and the modern apothecary holds this status legally’. By ‘modern’ the OED means 1888, when it published its section on words beginning with A, since when this item has not been updated. Chemist in the meantime took over as the name for a seller of drugs, as apothecary became obsolete. No doubt this is another annoyance for blameless non-druggy chemists.

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