Dot Wordsworth

Mind your language | 25 June 2011

Chemicals

issue 25 June 2011

Until the rain blew over, I sought refuge in a Pret A Manger and drank some ginger beer. For entertainment I read the label. ‘We do not add any weird chemicals,’ it said. No doubt Pret knows better than to say ‘any chemicals’. Water is a chemical, we are told by the know-alls (of the kind who script QI on the television).

Yet social attitudes to pure food are closely charted by the history of chemical as recorded in the Oxford English Dictionary. Chemical retains connotations that it possessed on its earliest use, in the 17th century. Then it often meant ‘a medicine’. A chemical was a substance refined from the coarse material of daily life. By the late 19th century, when the periodic table had been so neatly laid, chemicals, in the popular mind, went with chemistry sets.

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