Four New Words
New words often appear more or less spontaneously from popular culture, but in scientific circles it’s not uncommon to make new words deliberately. Mostly, I think, by naming things such as newly-discovered species and objects out in space.
The technical term for a new word, by the way, is neologism.
Chemists do this, too. Recently they manufactured a few atoms of each of four new elements, so naturally they want to name the elements. We don’t have a drawn-up list of element names like the National Hurricane Center does for hurricanes, and the chemists wait until they have at least a few of the atoms in existence (even if they last only a small fraction of a second) before naming them. And then they formalize the naming by presenting proposed names for public review before the names become official. Whew! At least in biology, whoever discovers a new species gets to name it.
Here are our four new words. I don’t anticipate any problems with their acceptance.
Here’s the site I stole this info from: http://www.compoundchem.com/2016/06/08/new-element-names/. If you want it from the horse’s mouth, visit the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry’s website.
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