Spell-Wrecker

Last week I posted an authoritative note about the curious way in which "aluminium" is spelt in North America. Since then I have discovered that a rather feeble spoof "explanation" of the misspelling has been put on the net by a bunch of jokers who call themselves the Los Alamos National Laboratory's Chemistry Division.

The home page is convincing enough, with the periodic table of the elements all done in rather jolly colours, but when you click on No 13, Al, you get this :

Wohler is generally credited with having isolated the metal in 1827, although an impure form was prepared by Oersted two years earlier. In 1807, Davy proposed the name ALUMINUM for the metal, undiscovered at that time, and later agreed to change it to aluminum. Shortly thereafter, the name ALUMINUM was adopted to conform with the "ium" ending of most elements, and this spelling is now in use elsewhere in the world.

Aluminium was also the accepted spelling in the U.S. until 1925, at which time the American Chemical Society officially decided to use the name aluminum thereafter in their publications.

If you read the first paragraph carefully you will get a buzzing sensation in the head; what has obviously happened is that in two places (which I have capitalised) the spoofers' (American) spell-checker has changed "aluminium" to "aluminum" so that the paragraph makes no sense at all. Oddly, this didn't happen in the second paragraph.

This only goes to show how careful you must be with proof-reading, even when you're only fooling about. It is really irresponsible of these people to get their joke wrong in this way; the American public is quite confused enough on this subject already.

For obvious reasons I am not running this post through my (International English) spell-checker before I publish it.

Still more about aluminium