A little while ago, maybe it was last year, I got on my high horse and posted a piece on how the word “gay’ has been taken over by the homosexual community. I suppose that calling a homosexual person a “gay” is less unpleasant to that person than hearing himself referred to as a homosexual, although for the life of me I cannot think why. I would not turn a long-lost hair on being referred to as a heterosexual. Anyway I am not here to re-hash that discourse, but I do want to remount the high horse and while standing up in the stirrups pontificate out loud on the subject of the use, misuse and abuse of the English language.

Today’s subject is the word “chemistry”.

For something close to six decades I have been closely involved in the study, practice, and teaching of chemistry, so I regard myself to be well-versed in what chemistry is; if asked I would say that chemistry is the scientific study of the nature and properties of atoms and molecules. Better yet is the “definition” found in the Urban Dictionary: [CHEMISTRY: The only natural science that can be broken down into the categories “making drugs” and “blowing stuff up”. Unfortunately, chemistry isn’t all fun and games, mostly because of chemistry teachers, who are always bitching about things like “significant figures” and “molality versus molarity”.]

However, increasingly in recent times, today’s word is being abused (in my less-than-humble opinion) in the sense of describing how persons interact with other persons, a sort of synonym of the word “rapport”. I looked up “rapport” in Wikipedia and the entry starts with: “A close and harmonious relationship in which the people or groups concerned understand each other’s feelings or ideas and communicate well.” It goes on to examine the concept in more detail, but nowhere therein do we find the word “chemistry” as being anything to do with “rapport”. Yet the above definition of “rapport” is exactly what the misguided ones mean when they use “chemistry” as something to do with human interactions.

So it seems that our beloved “chemistry” is on the path that “gay” travelled some years ago, and the generation that are currently in utero, on hearing the word “chemistry” will probably regard it as something to do with sex and not about significant figures and the like. Of course, this could result in chemistry classes being highly populated-at least for the first week.

A thought that occurred while writing the above is what about our foreign friends? Do the French use “chimie” and the Italians use “chimica” when they mean rapport (and rapporto)?

You get the picture.