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Today I discovered that the origin of the word tantalize came from the Greek myth about the god Tantalus. See today's http://www.qwantz.com
The small blog entry below also links to this comic about "garden path sentences"! Facinating!
There is also the chemical element tantalum, name likewise derived from the mythological Tantalus, but I'm not sure why that name was selected by its discoverer. Perhaps the most distinct chemical property of tantalum is its chemical inertness (it doesn't like to react with other elements). According to Wiki, the name was chosen because it was "difficult to isolate and tantalized chemists," but that's just Wiki and no reference is given for that assertion. Seems a bit of a stretch to me. Lots of elements are "difficult to isolate."
Heimhenge said:
There is also the chemical element tantalum, name likewise derived from the mythological Tantalus, but I'm not sure why that name was selected by its discoverer. Perhaps the most distinct chemical property of tantalum is its chemical inertness (it doesn't like to react with other elements). According to Wiki, the name was chosen because it was "difficult to isolate and tantalized chemists," but that's just Wiki and no reference is given for that assertion. Seems a bit of a stretch to me. Lots of elements are "difficult to isolate."
I'm only speculating here, but that's all I have. So Steve Gagnon gives this history of the discovery of Tantalum, which includes a reference to Niobium (No. 41), which is itself a reference to Niobe, the daughter of King Tantalus. The chemical compositions are similar, though a bit different, and some had accused Anders Gustaf Ekenberg, the discoverer of Tantalum, of passing off an allotrope as a new chemical element. Why? I have no idea. Niobe, Tantalus's daughter, turns up less frequently than does Tantalus's son, whom King Tantalus apparently tried to feed to the gods. (Wow, Greek mythology comes up, and it's not any of the things I've studied — my liberal arts major fails me once again).
However, there was already an element Niobium, and, perhaps, the persons responsible at the time for naming such things (the Royal Society?) thought the element Tantalum was older, or, rather, a more rudimentary chemical, than the other.
So, on another somewhat related note, it was required of me to learn the periodic table in order, of course, except for the lanthanides and actinides. To get an "A", it was necessary to fill in all the blanks on the table with the name, symbol, and number (no atomic weights necessary) on the blank table. This was my sophomore year in high school. Anybody else have a similar experience? And do kids have to do that now?
This from a science teacher of 30 years … no way! I went to HS in the late 60s, and college in the early 70s. Never had to do such a memorization exercise. As computers (and calculators) became available in the late 80s, that kind of memorization task fell out of use. The conventional wisdom was that the ability to find what you needed trumped the ability to memorize it. And that's pretty much the state of pedagogy these days. I resisted it at first, but finally went with the flow.
Still not sure if that's the best of all worlds, but it's the way education works these days.
Martha Barnette
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