Word: phlogiston
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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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...