Bill Whittle Is Wrong About Aluminum
Bill Whittle begins a recent edition of his PJTV program Afterburner with an interesting concession. In most conflicts between the US and the rest of the world, he argues, we're right and they're wrong. But there are two exceptions:
1. The game the rest of the world calls "football" is more deserving of the name than the game we call "football."
2. It should be aluminium, not aluminum.
I have no comment on the suggestion that we're usually right and the rest of the world is usually wrong, nor on Whittle's excoriation of the whole World Cup phenomenon, but I am forced to take exception to item 2.
I have spent a good deal of time working and living overseas, and have had the chance to hang with quite a few Brits, Aussies, and other Commonwealth folks, and I can tell you that however cordial relations may be between an American and any of them, this issue of aluminum vs. aluminium is never very far from the surface. Generally, the subject comes up after a pint or two (or three) and things have started to fall apart, but we're not quite yet to the point where people are accused of always being late for every war or of having bad teeth.*
Why do we spell it "aluminum" when the word is clearly "aluminium?" The spelling of "calcium," "magnesium," "plutonium," and numerous other elements suggest that our spelling of "aluminum" is a pretty glaring mistake. This is the argument Whittle makes, along with the rest of the world, with the important difference being that Bill doesn't offer this up as evidence that Americans are semi-literate baboons.
However, this argument from consistency fails on the merits, as I have pointed out on countless occasions following the aforementioned pint or two (or three.) Why do they worry about our misspelling of "aluminium" when their own misspelling of the word that clearly should be "platinium" is just as glaring? Also, what about molybdenum? Shouldn't that be "molybdenium?" I always mention both platinum and molybdenum, the former because it clearly refutes the idea that an element name can't end in "num" rather than "nium" and the latter because my opponents, though clearly the products of a superior educational system and my intellectual betters in every way, have by and large never heard of it.
But let's put the argument about consistency away. There is a much more compelling reason why we are right to spell "aluminum" as we do. "Aluminum" is the name given to the element by Sir Humphry Davy, the (British) chemist who first identified the metal base of alum. (There is one earlier reference by Davy to "alumium," presumably meaning the same thing, but this was part of a dashed-off list of potential elements that might be discovered, not the definitive work on isolating aluminum. Since no one has ever used this version of the name, we can discount it.)
Davy named the element "aluminum," Americans call it "aluminum," so we're right and the world is wrong.
Right?
Well, it isn't quite that simple. Although it wasn't his idea to change the spelling, Davy did eventually go along with the change to "aluminium," which caught on in Britain after the original spelling was already out and becoming the accepted usage in the US. The Wikipedia article on the subject actually gives a pretty good account of what happened.
Davy had settled on aluminum by the time he published his 1812 book Chemical Philosophy: "This substance appears to contain a peculiar metal, but as yet Aluminum has not been obtained in a perfectly free state, though alloys of it with other metalline substances have been procured sufficiently distinct to indicate the probable nature of alumina." But the same year, an anonymous contributor to the Quarterly Review, a British political-literary journal, in a review of Davy's book, objected to aluminum and proposed the name aluminium, "for so we shall take the liberty of writing the word, in preference to aluminum, which has a less classical sound."
So as is often the case in these instances of divergent spelling, it isn't really about who is right and who is wrong. Both spellings are legitimate. When Americans use the older British spelling, we honor the wishes of an important scientist who made many substantial contributions to human knowledge. When Brits (and all those Brit-wannabes out there) use the more recent British spelling, they honor the wishes of some anonymous pencil-pusher remembered only for his pretentiousness and his ability to play on the unique British anxiety that perhaps one doesn't sound as "classical" as one might.
If there is a more succinct and revealing example of the difference between American and British culture than that, I haven't come across it yet.
* Granted, those two accusations are specific to Brits vs. Americans, but Brits are who we're really arguing with in these instances. Aussies and New Zealanders don't (necessarily) have bad teeth, but they all see themselves as Brits when it comes to the spelling of "aluminum."
