5/30/2023 0 Comments Wordscape 909Its surface shape, a mixture of hexagons and pentagons, reminded people of a football (soccer ball) and so some wits took to calling it soccerballene and footballene. They named the substance buckminsterfullerene. The first one discovered was a sixty-carbon sphere which reminded its discoverers at Rice University in Texas of the geodesic dome, which had been invented by the American engineer and architect R Buckminster Fuller (a notable example was exhibited at Expo ’67 in Montreal). It’s one of a large group of hollow carbon molecules, variously shaped like eggs, tubes, rugby balls or spheres. So if you’re a chemist with a little time on your hands, let us know when you’ve made one of these things. Volleyballene is a molecule waiting to be synthesized. At the moment, it exists only as a computer design: This produces a shape made up of pentagons and octagons that looks a bit like an ultra-miniature volleyball. It’s a hollow sphere of 60 carbon atoms and 20 atoms of scandium. Last week, I encountered a substance called volleyballene. Scientists have a puckish sense of humour. Poll ultimately comes from its sense of the head (hence poll in the election and survey senses, literally counting heads) and from a polled person being one whose hair has been cut short or shaved later a polled deer was one that had cast its antlers and a polled animal was one of a breed naturally lacking horns. ( Indent comes from a related idea.) Michael Grounds emailed to point out that the jagged lines were also called horns and that a legal document such as a will, for which no counterpart copy was needed, was called a deed poll, from the document being polled, lacking horns. Many readers reminded me that the legal documents I mentioned in the piece, of which the counterpart copies were cut apart with a jagged edge, were called indentures because the cut edges looked fancifully like teeth. There is probably a chicken-and-egg argument as to whether the latter term derived from the sheet, or the sheet derived from pilots who, much like their winged friends, made their displeasure known in forthright tones.” Jim Tang wrote about a related expression: “When problems are noted that ground an airplane, they are normally memorialized on a squawk sheet. Nobody was able to assist with the early history of this odd term, though several pointed out other circumstances in which holes were punched in sheets as confirmations that an action had been taken. Several readers pointed out that, before J R Williams had created the term, wart by itself had already some currency as slang for a junior army officer and in the US for an obnoxious or objectionable person (the first recorded user in the Oxford English Dictionary is the American writer George Ade, in 1896). Gregory Harris commented, “It might have been useful to mention that verbigeration is said with a soft g, like refrigeration, and not a hard g, like invigorate.”
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