Are we giving chemicals bad names?

Back in the distant past – that is, the early 1990s – I sat in a dusty lecture theatre, listening to an organic chemistry lecturer as he wrote on a blackboard that rotated in an enormous loop. At some point he mentioned capric acid. He didn’t draw the structure, and I didn’t ask because I was too busy scribbling things down.

Later I wanted to know the formula of capric acid. But by then I was in my student accommodation, away from the chemistry department where I might have found someone to ask. This was a time before widespread access to internet-connected computers. Smartphones and digital assistants were the stuff of science fiction.

The name wasn’t in my dictionary, nor the index of the few expensive textbooks I’d scraped together the funds to buy. So… I resigned myself to not knowing. ‘The past,’ as the writer L P Hartley said, ‘is a foreign country. They do things differently there.’

Further into the past, 250 years or so, things were, strangely enough, easier – there were only a few well-known chemical substances to learn. But in the late 1700s, things exploded (often literally, health and safety not being what it is today). Swathes of new compounds were being isolated and named with little in the way of a consistent system.