‘“I am not screwed,” replied the Caterpillar, solemnly. “Whisky and potass does not agree with everybody; but I am not screwed, not at all.” So speaking he sat down rather suddenly.’
By screwed he meant ‘drunk’ of course. The Caterpillar is not the one in Alice in Wonderland but the nickname of a fifth-former in a book you might not wish your wife or your servants to read. It is The Hill by Horace Annesley Vachell (1905) about boys at Harrow, more particularly the love between them. Surprisingly it caused no outrage at the time.
The Caterpillar was drunk on whisky, then sometimes mixed with potassium bicarbonate water. In Doctor Claudius (1883) by F. Marion Crawford, in a scene in Baden-Baden, we are told that an English duke was drinking ‘curaçao and potass water’. Crawford was a man, not a woman, and an American who settled in Italy. Curiously, potassium carbonate is used in glassmaking, and Crawford’s death was attributed to his inhalation a decade earlier of toxic gases at a glassworks in Colorado.
But far more remarkable to me than that small chime of potassium references is that the word potassium derives from the earthy English word potash. ‘I discovered sodium a few days after I discovered potassium, in the year 1807,’ Humphry Davy noted in 1812. So it is true that, as it says in the first clerihew ever composed by Edmund Clerihew Bentley:
Sir Humphry Davy
Abominated gravy.
He lived in the odium
Of having discovered sodium.
At least, the bit about discovering sodium is true. I don’t know about the gravy.
It is not as simple as Sir Humphry Latinising potash by calling it potassium. The leached remnants of wood or vegetable ashes were called in Germanic languages potash (English), pot-asschen (Dutch) or Pottasche (German). Romance languages borrowed the words as potasse (French, 1690) or potasa (Spanish, 1791 or earlier). Davy succeeded in separating the metallic element potassium from the compound. But the symbol K for the element, short for kalium, derives from the Arabic al-qali (from qala, ‘to bake’) in use from the Middle Ages for ‘potash’, which also gives us alkali.
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