Why Is This Element So Sour?
First, the question of blame. Who has annoyed this element so thoroughly that its permanent condition is described as sour?
Even the Duden has filed the grump away with that very attribute. I mean, if you come into the world as Sauerstoff — literally “sour stuff” — and you’re the thing that keeps its creatures alive — you really shouldn’t be surprised at your own reputation for bad moods.
Is this, perhaps, the stuff that dreams are made of? Sour visions about the textile industry? In the seventies, I’d occasionally hear a voice on the night streets of Basel calling out: “Got any Stuff?” Yes, I did, and mostly right there on my body. But it was neither sour nor cheerful, being simply and plainly a shaped material in the form of jeans or a T-shirt.
Though, if I’m being honest about those jeans — washed-out, full of holes, shabby in every possible way — my parents were, shall we say, a little on the sour side about them. And the blame for that lay squarely with the fabric of a Levi’s or a Wrangler.
The sour element has other qualities besides staring grumpily into the middle distance. It is prominent and popular, without having the faintest idea. If it did have an inkling, it might be a little less sour and finally a little grateful. But that’s asking too much, because what’s truly sour about the stuff of life is its complete absence of personality. It doesn’t care about anything or anyone. It doesn’t care about anything or anyone. That’s not modesty — that’s indifference at the molecular level.
And yet this very sour stuff is the basic element of our existence. After all, we carry inside us a pair of lungs that do have wings — they just never use them to fly, only to breathe. Reinhard Mey’s freedom above the clouds is of no interest to the lungs whatsoever. They lounge about in the body, waiting for the next breath.
Long story, missing point — set that aside for a moment: I still had no idea why oxygen is called Sauerstoff. But the dictionary could help.
Where did oxygen pick up its bad mood? Oxygen isn’t sour at all — it’s the victim of a historical blunder.
Antoine Lavoisier baptised the element in 1777 as “Oxygène,” from the Greek: oxys (sour, sharp) + genes (producing). So: “acid-producer.” Lavoisier was convinced that every acid necessarily contained oxygen.
The Germans dutifully translated it word for word: Sauerstoff.
Conclusion: that was probably the first step in what became the often rather sour relationship between Germany and France.
Only: Lavoisier was wrong. Hydrochloric acid — HCl — gets along perfectly well without any oxygen. The element that actually deserves the acid-forming title is hydrogen. And of that we’ve said nothing at all yet. The name stuck anyway, for nearly 250 years now. Oxygen is, in a manner of speaking, a small-time fraud — carrying a professional title for a job it never held.
A civil servant of chemistry, one who only spoke French, misfiled something and never corrected it.
Small wonder the stuff is so sour.
“Hold your breath!” was a beloved game at the swimming pool. Whoever could stay underwater the longest, without coming into contact with oxygen, was the lucky winner. The real prize waited at the surface, when both wings of both lungs could fill again with oxygen. That was a deeply contented sigh of relief.
Let us regard the universally beloved Oxygène as the stuff we turn sour about only when we can’t get it.
“Dear oxygen, you are a trillion times more popular than Taylor Swift will ever be.” Full stop.
Depicted person: LAVOISIER (Antoine Laurent de) Wikidata has entry Antoine Lavoisier (Q39607) with data related to LAVOISIER (Antoine Laurent de).