Word: phlogiston
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They order these matters better in the natural sciences. Chemistry would not have improved much since Lavoisier's youth if chemists were still loosely calling all combustible materials phlogiston. The word oxygen means what it means, and neither Humpty Dumpty nor Spiro Agnew can alter that. New things-or newly discovered things -need new names. When a new microorganism swims into the biologist's ken, he does not reach back into folklore and call it a "small dragon"; he quarries the lexicon of a very dead language and concocts, say, "staphylococcus," a word never known before on land...
Professor Handlin's answer (which your writer reported with somewhat more accuracy than my question) that Marxist intellectual work is comparable to phlogiston chemistry was entirely predictable. To this it was pointed out that the Marxist intellectual tradition is very much alive and thriving, that contemporary Marxists have a great deal to contribute to the search for truth about society and history, and that one could find without looking too hard a great many fine Marxist thinkers who observed all of the traditional standards of scholarship in their work, and whose presence would do credit to any university...
...Phlogiston...
...read Marx," he continued. "I have been significantly influenced by the Marxist tradition ... But to ask why there are so few Marxists here is to ask why there are no chemists here who teach the phlogiston tradition...
Leonard K. Nash, associate professor of Chemistry, actively disproved the Phlogiston theory in Natural Sciences 4 yesterday morning by an unintentional explosion which slightly injured him, deafened his students, and shattered glass as far as the back row of Burr...