Indeed the name is said to signify a monk's bane.' Yet it must be exhibited with discretion: Zwingerius likens it to the sword of Scanderberg, which is either good or bad, strong or weak, as is the party that prescribes or uses it, a worthy medicine if it be rightly applied to a strong man, otherwise it may prove but a froward vomit. I have known one handed down for generations, perhaps from the time of Paracelsus himself.

How odd (not significant in any way of course - I am a rationalist) that a few minutes after turning aside from your admirable blog and picking up my current novel, The Ionian Mission by Patrick O'Brian, I found an amusing exchange on the medical effects of antimony (pp 49-50) ending in this: 'It is one of the most economical forms of physic known to man, since a single pill of the metal will serve a numerous household, being ingested, rejected and so recovered. That is ultimately the reason why these two words of such similar appearance, and which are evidently confusable, have different stressings.Īn interesting footnote: the OED mentions that the French name of the element, antimoine, has been interpreted by popular etymology as meaning ‘monks’-bane’. Although the etymology of antimony is obscure, the OED traces it back as far as a medieval Latin form antimōnium, evidently assimilated to this pattern. The Greek word for law, νόμος nómos, has a short vowel between the nasals, whereas the Latin suffix -mōni-, in caerĭmōnia and testĭmōnium, has a long one. So it belongs in this respect with ceremony and testimony. The stress pattern of antimony, on the other hand, is initial: BrE ˈæntɪməni, AmE ˈæntɪmoʊni. (It’s also the usual pattern for the book of Deuteronomy in the Bible, though when I was at school our headmaster made us call it ˈdjuːtərəˌnɒmi, to bring out our awareness that this was the Second book of the Law.) The stress pattern of antinomy is antepenultimate, ænˈtɪnəmi, like that of other compounds of Greek -nomy: autonomy, economy, astronomy, taxonomy. I’m just a little shocked, not so much that the author of the book got this wrong (anyone can make a mistake), but that no one at Weidenfeld and Nicolson, publishers of the hardback in 2006, noticed it, no readers of the hardback brought it to the publishers’ attention, and no one at Orion/Phoenix, publishers of the 2007 paperback that I am reading, noticed it either.

What Russell gave his name to was properly an antinomy, a contradiction, paradox, or conflict.

It is now “increasingly being used in the semiconductor industry as a dopant for ultra-high conductivity n-type silicon wafers, in the production of diodes, infrared detectors, and Hall-effect devices”. Not once but twice Leavitt refers to a logical paradox which he calls Russell’s antimony.īut even those of us who didn’t do chemistry at school probably know that antimony is the name of a chemical element, the one whose atomic number is 51 and whose symbol is Sb. It is The Man who Knew Too Much, by David Leavitt, an account of the life and work of the mathematician and cryptographer Alan Turing. I was surprised, though, to find a similar error in a recently published paperback I am reading.

I heard ‘renumeration’ (remuneration) again on the BBC R4 Today programme this morning (blog, 14 July).

Antimony paradox