The Queen has had a vegetable garden laid out behind Buckingham Palace. ‘No chemicals are used and the plot is irrigated from the palace borehole,’ reported the Sunday Times. This use of chemicals annoys some people, mostly chemists. By chemists, of course, I do not mean pharmacists, whom I normally do call chemists, to their annoyance. Fortunately I can distinguish between physicists and physicians, though I usually call the latter doctors, like my husband, even if many of them hold no doctorate, in medicine or anything else.
I mean to suggest by these remarks about chemists and doctors that words do not always mean what we would like them to, or what they once meant. Thus the earlier use of the word chemicals, in the 17th and 18th centuries, often referred to medicines. In the 19th century, the connotation ‘harmful substances’ emerged, normally those of an artificial nature.
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