Nomenclature Quotes

The time I trust will come, perhaps within the lives of some of us, when the outline of this science will be clearly made out and generally recognised, when its nomenclature will be fixed, and its principles form a part of elementary instruction.

Nassau William Senior

Science, Principles, Instruction

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To that class we may leave it to refine the vernacular dialects of the country, to enrich those dialects with terms of science borrowed from the Western nomenclature, and to render them by degrees fit vehicles for conveying knowledge to the great mass of the population.

Thomas B. Macaulay

Country, Class, Degrees

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Thus, while I thought myself employed only in forming a Nomenclature, and while I proposed to myself nothing more than to improve the chemical language, my work transformed itself by degrees, without my being able to prevent it, into a treatise upon the Elements of Chemistry.

Antoine Lavoisier

Able, Degrees, Elements

"Elements of Chemistry". Book by Antoine Lavoisier, 1790.

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All your names I and my friend approve of or nearly all as to sense & expression, but I am frightened by their length & sound when compounded. As you will see I have taken deoxide and skaiode because they agree best with my natural standard East and West. I like Anode & Cathode better as to sound, but all to whom I have shewn them have supposed at first that by Anode I meant No way.

Michael Faraday

Taken, Science, Expression

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Your remarks upon chemical notation with the variety of systems which have arisen, &c., &c., had almost stirred me up to regret publicly that such hindrances to the progress of science should exist. I cannot help thinking it a most unfortunate thing that men who as experimentalists & philosophers are the most fitted to advance the general cause of science & knowledge should by promulgation of their own theoretical views under the form of nomenclature, notation, or scale, actually retard its progress.

Michael Faraday

Regret, Science, Men

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I have taken your advice and the names used are anode cathode anions cations and ions the last I shall have but little occasion for. I had some hot objections made to them here and found myself very much in the condition of the man with his son and Ass who tried to please every body.

Michael Faraday

Taken, Son, Science

"The Correspondence of Michael Faraday: 1832-December 1840, Letters 525-1333".

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Magnetic lines of force convey a far better and purer idea than the phrase magnetic current or magnetic flood: it avoids the assumption of a current or of two currents and also of fluids or a fluid, yet conveys a full and useful pictorial idea to the mind.

Michael Faraday

Science, Ideas, Two

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Nomenclature, the other foundation of botany, should provide the names as soon as the classification is made... If the names are unknown knowledge of the things also perishes... For a single genus, a single name.

Carl Linnaeus

Knowledge, Science, Names

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Never argue with a pedant over nomenclature. It wastes your time and annoys the pedant.

Lois McMaster Bujold

Waste, Pedants, Arguing

Lois McMaster Bujold (1996). “Memory (Hardcover)”, p.186, Baen Books

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As ideas are preserved and communicated by means of words, it necessarily follows that we cannot improve the language of any science, without at the same time improving the science itself; neither can we, on the other hand, improve a science without improving the language or nomenclature which belongs to it.

Antoine Lavoisier

Mean, Science, Hands

Antoine Laurent Lavoisier (1802). “Elements of chemistry, tr. by R. Kerr”, p.18

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When he frowned again, she was fairly sure that the nomenclature did not please him, and she found herself wishing she had been birthed to other syllables.

J.R. Ward

Wish, Found, Please

J.R. Ward (2011). “Lover Unleashed: A Novel of the Black Dagger Brotherhood”, p.80, Penguin

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Many will, no doubt, prefer to retain old unsystematic names as far as possible, but it is easy to see that the desire to avoid change may carry us too far in this direction; it will undoubtedly be very inconvenient to the present generation of chemists to abandon familiar and cherished names, but nevertheless it may be a wise course to boldly face the difficulty, rather than inflict on coming generations a partially illogical and unsystematic nomenclature.

Henry Edward Armstrong

Wise, Science, Names

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The impossibility of separating the nomenclature of a science from the science itself, is owing to this, that every branch of physical science must consist of three things; the series of facts which are the objects of the science, the ideas which represent these facts, and the words by which these ideas are expressed. Like three impressions of the same seal, the word ought to produce the idea, and the idea to be a picture of the fact.

Antoine Lavoisier

Science, Ideas, Three

Antoine Laurent Lavoisier, David M. Knight (1998). “The Development of Chemistry, 1789-1914: Elements of chemistry”, p.14, Taylor & Francis

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The attempt of Lavoisier to reform chemical nomenclature is premature. One single experiment may destroy the whole filiation of his terms; and his string of sulphates, sulphites, and sulphures, may have served no end than to have retarded the progress of science by a jargon, from the confusion of which time will be requisite to extricate us.

Thomas Jefferson

Science, Confusion, Confusing

Thomas Jefferson, H. A. Washington (2011). “The Writings of Thomas Jefferson: Being His Autobiography, Correspondence, Reports, Messages, Addresses, and Other Writings, Official and Private”, p.432, Cambridge University Press

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Imagine a school-boy who has outgrown his clothes. Imagine the repairs made on the vestments where the enlarged frame had burst the narrow limits of its inclosure. Imagine the additions made where the projecting limbs had fairly and far emerged beyond the confines of the garment. Imagine the boy still growing, and the clothes, mended all over, now more than ever in want of mending - such is chemistry, and such its nomenclature.

John Joseph Griffin

School, Science, Boys

"Chemical Recreations" by John Joseph Griffin, 7th Edition, (p. 189), 1834.

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I speculate over some of the Anglo nomenclature of birds: Wilson's snipe, Forster's tern . . . : What natural images do these names conjure up in our minds? What integrity do we give back to the birds with our labels.

Terry Tempest Williams

Integrity, Names, Giving

Terry Tempest Williams (1984). “Pieces of White Shell: A Journey to Navajoland”, p.66, UNM Press

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You have heard of the new chemical nomenclature endeavored to be introduced by Lavoisier, Fourcroy, &c. Other chemists of this country, of equal note, reject it, and prove in my opinion that it is premature, insufficient and false. These latter are joined by the British chemists; and upon the whole, I think the new nomenclature will be rejected, after doing more harm than good. There are some good publications in it, which must be translated into the ordinary chemical language before they will be useful.

Thomas Jefferson

Country, Science, Thinking

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Smokey, this is not 'Nam. This is bowling. There are rules.

John Goodman

Bowling

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In science, each new point of view calls forth a revolution in nomenclature.

Friedrich Engels

Views, Statistics, Revolution

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A child is not a Christian child, not a Muslim child, but a child of Christian parents or a child of Muslim parents. This latter nomenclature, by the way, would be an excellent piece of consciousness-raising for the children themselves. A child who is told she is a 'child of Muslim parents' will immediately realize that religion is something for her to choose -or reject- when she becomes old enough to do so.

Richard Dawkins

Christian, Children, Parent

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Many errors, of a truth, consist merely in the application of the wrong names of things. For if a man says that the lines which are drawn from the centre of the circle to the circumference are not equal, he understands by the circle, at all events for the time, something else than mathematicians understand by it.

Baruch Spinoza

Truth, Science, Men

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The mathematics clearly called for a set of underlying elementary objects-at that time we needed three types of them-elementary objects that could be combined three at a time in different ways to make all the heavy particles we knew. ... I needed a name for them and called them quarks, after the taunting cry of the gulls, "Three quarks for Muster mark," from Finnegan's Wake by the Irish writer James Joyce.

Murray Gell-Mann

Science, Names, Different

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My amateur interest in astronomy brought out the term "magnitude," which is used for the brightness of a star.

Charles Richet

Stars, Science, Brightness

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There is a reference in Aristotle to a gnat produced by larvae engendered in the slime of vinegar. This must have been Drosophila.

Alfred Sturtevant

Science, Gnats, Vinegar

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And teach me how To name the bigger light, and how the less, That burn by day and night.

William Shakespeare

Science, Moon, Night

William Shakespeare, Kathleen Ermitage (2002). “The Tempest”, p.56, Barron's Educational Series

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