Chemistry

In Korean, "chemi" (케미) means the attraction that arises of itself between two people, the rapport that needs no rehearsal. It is the word in "those two have good chemi" or "the leads' chemi is explosive," and it is a colloquial clipping of the first two syllables of English chemistry. To ask what "chemistry" means between people and to ask where the word for the science comes from is, then, the same question. Set beside the announcement of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry, which comes round each year in early October, the fact that the science in the prize's name and the "chemi" of entertainment news are one word is where this story begins. The Online Etymology Dictionary records that chemistry appears around 1600 meaning "alchemy," formed from chemist with -ry. The sense "natural physical process" follows in the 1640s, and "the scientific study of the composition of material things and the changes they undergo" by 1788. Chemist is earlier: attested in the 1560s, in the form chymist, meaning "alchemist," from French chimiste and Medieval Latin chimista, a shortening of alchimista. The dictionary dates the sense "chemical scientist" from the 1620s and the British sense "dealer in medicinal drugs," the pharmacist, from 1745. Behind chemistry, then, stands alchemy, and in front of alchemy stands al-. The dictionary records that alchemy entered English in the mid-fourteenth century, from Old French alchimie (fourteenth century) and its earlier form alquemie (thirteenth century), from Medieval Latin alkimia, from Arabic al-kīmiyāʾ (الكيمياء). Arabic al- is the definite article, "the," and what remains when it is removed, kīmiyāʾ, is Late Greek khēmeia (χημεία). The dictionary notes that this Greek word is found around 300 CE in a decree of Diocletian against "the old writings of the Egyptians." That decree is what the tenth-century Byzantine lexicon, the Suda, is reported to gloss, under the heading χημεία, as the preparation of silver and gold, adding that Diocletian sought out and burned the books about it (the entry itself is not checked here). No record contemporary with the emperor has been confirmed, so the decree is given here only as a later tradition. Q: Where, then, did Greek khēmeia itself come from? A: The dictionary withholds an answer. Two accounts compete, and it says only that the word "seems to have elements of both origins." The first account is Egypt. Plutarch writes in Isis and Osiris 33 that Egypt, "which has the blackest of soils, they call by the same name as the black of the eye, Chemia (Χημία)." The Egyptians called their land "the black land" because of the dark silt the Nile brought down each year, and on this account the name of the land attached itself to the land's art of working metals, so that the word meant "the Egyptian art." The second account stays inside Greek: from khein (χεῖν) "to pour," khymatos "that which is poured out," the art of melting, mixing, and pouring metals. Klein, citing Muss-Arnolt, calls the second account folk etymology. What is reasonably clear is only that around 300 CE there was in Alexandria an art of transmuting metals and a name for it; whether the name came from the land or from molten metal is not decided here. The name and the art passed to the Arabs. The dictionary records that the Arabs took both from the Alexandrians and that they entered Europe by way of Arabic Spain. Arabic handed its nouns over with the article al- still attached, and Latin and French took the article as part of the word. Alcohol (al-kuḥl), algebra (al-jabr), alkali (al-qily), and algorithm, from the name al-Khwārizmī, all came in wearing their al-. Chemistry, however, dropped it. At the end of its entry for alchemy the dictionary writes that alchemy was the "chemistry" of the Middle Ages and early modern times, embracing occult and natural philosophy together with practical chemistry and metallurgy, but that after about 1600 the strictly scientific sense went with chemistry, and alchemy was left with "the pursuit of the transmutation of baser metals into gold, the search for the universal solvent and the panacea." One article fell away and one word became two, the one keeping the past, the other taking the future. Two books fixed the division. In 1661 Robert Boyle, in The Sceptical Chymist, attacked the four elements of Aristotle and the three principles of Paracelsus and set up a notion of the element that experiment could test; the spelling chymist in his title is the form of his day, the spelling in which the word first appeared in the 1560s. In 1789 Antoine Lavoisier, in the Traité élémentaire de chimie, drew up a table of elements on the principle of the conservation of mass, and the dictionary's date of about 1788 for the sense "science" coincides with this moment. The name of the science became the name of a prize. In his will of 1895 Alfred Nobel divided the prize into five parts and named as the second "the person who shall have made the most important chemical discovery or improvement"; he had himself spent his life as a chemist handling nitroglycerin in the laboratory. The "chemistry" of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry, announced each year in early October by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, is a word that came down this road from Egypt, or from molten metal. The figure of speech grew on its own. A well-known instance of likening the meeting and mutual change of people to chemistry is Goethe. His novel of 1809, Die Wahlverwandtschaften (Elective Affinities), takes its title from a term of the chemistry of the day, "elective affinity," which the Swedish chemist Torbern Bergman had used in 1775, in De attractionibus electivis, for the tendency of a substance to choose one partner over another; Goethe drew the attractions and recombinations of four people as if they were a chemical equation. The dictionary records the figurative sense of "instinctual attraction or affinity" from about 1600, growing straight out of the alchemical sense, so the figure is not a twentieth-century coinage but some four hundred years old, and in today's English it serves love, acting, and sport alike: "The two leads have great chemistry," "There was no chemistry between us," "team chemistry." Korean took the figure but kept only its first two syllables. "Chemi" seems to have spread through broadcast captions and entertainment journalism from around the 2010s in phrases such as "the chemi is good" and "the chemi explodes," and Urimalsaem, the open dictionary of the National Institute of Korean Language, lists it as "a word, in the sense of a chemical reaction, for the harmony or rapport between people," writing the chemistry into the definition itself. The Sino-Korean word for the science, hwahak (化學), has a short story of its own. In nineteenth-century Japan the scholars of Dutch learning called the science seimi (舎密) after the sound of Dutch chemie, and from 1837 Udagawa Yōan published the Seimi kaisō (舎密開宗), translating Western chemistry and coining the terms for oxygen, hydrogen, and nitrogen still used today. The word 化學 came later, as a translation term said to have been coined in mid-nineteenth-century China (the Shanghai periodical Liuhe congtan, 六合叢談, is among the early instances cited, though the first attestation is not settled here), and when Japan adopted it in place of 舎密 in the later nineteenth century, 化學 settled into Korean as well. The Shuowen jiezi glosses 化 as "teaching put into practice" and derives it from 匕 and 人; since 匕 is a person drawn upside down, 化 shows a person upright and a person inverted — a person becoming other. If Western chemistry was black earth or molten metal, Eastern 化學 was from the first "the study of becoming other." The Korean dictionary defines hwahak as the branch of natural science that studies the composition, structure, properties, and changes of matter, and everyday speech uses the first two syllables of the English figure, as in "those two have good chemi."