<html><body><div style="color:#000; background-color:#fff; font-family:HelveticaNeue, Helvetica Neue, Helvetica, Arial, Lucida Grande, sans-serif;font-size:10pt"><div><span>Perhaps, but you certainly wouldn't expect him to call it "mercury." Way too many conflicting associations there. And I doubt there would be a common term for it anyway---who would have it sitting around the house?<br></span></div> <div class="qtdSeparateBR"><br><br></div><div style="display: block;" class="yahoo_quoted"> <div style="font-family: HelveticaNeue, Helvetica Neue, Helvetica, Arial, Lucida Grande, sans-serif; font-size: 10pt;"> <div style="font-family: HelveticaNeue, Helvetica Neue, Helvetica, Arial, Lucida Grande, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;"> <div dir="ltr"> <font face="Arial" size="2"> On Wednesday, July 16, 2014 11:47 AM, Jeffery Wilson clueland.com <jwilson@clueland.com> wrote:<br> </font> </div> <blockquote style="border-left: 2px solid rgb(16, 16, 255);
margin-left: 5px; margin-top: 5px; padding-left: 5px;"> <br><br> <div class="y_msg_container">On 7/16/2014 8:59 AM, Mo Holkar wrote:<br clear="none">> Hydrargyrum is the Latinized Greek name for mercury, hence its chemical<br clear="none">> symbol Hg. The 'gyr' is just part of 'argyros', Greek for silver.<br clear="none">><br clear="none">> My understanding is that everything described about this liquid in the<br clear="none">> text is satisfied by mercury, so there seems no reason to consider it to<br clear="none">> be anything different.<br clear="none">><br clear="none">> It's not the same (it seems to me) as where he calls a riding beast by<br clear="none">> the name of a prehistoric animal and so we must understand it's not that<br clear="none">> animal and nor is it a horse. Hydrargyrum is not an ancient substance<br clear="none">> predecessor to mercury; it's an archaic name for precisely contemporary<br
clear="none">> mercury.<br clear="none"><br clear="none">G.W. says, "Latin is once or twice employed to indicate that <br clear="none">inscriptions and the like are in a language Severian appears to consider <br clear="none">obsolete. What the actual language may have been, I cannot say."<br clear="none"><br clear="none">In 3.37, it is writ, "Whatever had occurred, the mace was gone, and I <br clear="none">held in my hands only the sword's hilt, from which protruded less than a <br clear="none">cubit of shattered metal. The hydrargyrum that had labored so long in <br clear="none">the darkness there ran from it now in silver tears."<br clear="none"><br clear="none">If this substance is mercury, as known to the ancient Greeks and <br clear="none">popularized in current science and left in dangerous quantities from the <br clear="none">mid 20th century peak of its production and use, and suitable for <br clear="none">Galilean vacuums, mercury switches,
and driving hatters mad, it seems <br clear="none">odd that there would be no current word for it encountered by Severian.<br clear="none"><br clear="none"><br clear="none">-- <br clear="none">Jeff Wilson - < <a shape="rect" ymailto="mailto:jwilson@clueland.com" href="mailto:jwilson@clueland.com">jwilson@clueland.com</a> ><br clear="none">A&M Texarkana Computational Intelligence Lab<br clear="none">< <a shape="rect" href="http://www.tamut.edu/cil" target="_blank">http://www.tamut.edu/cil </a>><div class="yqt4007012161" id="yqtfd53333"><br clear="none">_______________________________________________<br clear="none">Urth Mailing List<br clear="none">To post, write <a shape="rect" ymailto="mailto:urth@urth.net" href="mailto:urth@urth.net">urth@urth.net</a><br clear="none">Subscription/information: <a shape="rect" href="http://www.urth.net/" target="_blank">http://www.urth.net</a><br clear="none"></div><br><br></div> </blockquote> </div>
</div> </div> </div></body></html>