“Intro classes’
Sweeping natures:
Learn AND speak
The nomenclatures!
Some, acknowledged;
Many, hid;
Closer reads can
Build a bridge.”
As I begin a new semester this week, it’s a good time to bring back the NaPoWriMo2025 translation routine.
This poem was posted on 14 April 2025 on Bluesky and kicked off a week in which I explored the etymology behind several scientific terms, as detailed in Isaac Asimov’s fascinating book Words of Science and the History Behind Them, published first in 1959.
Asimov’s book delves into the history behind several terms from physical science, providing space and context for a perspective broader than what is typically used in an introductory course. I remember wishing for something like his book as a student (and yet am not terribly surprised that it took me this long to find it as a faculty member).
“Intro classes’/
Sweeping natures: /
Learn AND speak /
The nomenclatures!”
In an introductory science course, students are learning the vocabulary (the “nomenclatures”) and simultaneously applying the vocabulary via complex problems, case studies, and lab experiments.
“Some, acknowledged; /
Many, hid…”
Chemical nomenclature (or “IUPAC nomenclature,” where IUPAC stands for International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry) is a massive endeavor in itself: a standardized, self-consistent naming scheme whereby any chemist can write a name for a compound that another chemist can interpret.
Although it is the most obvious and “acknowledged,” the IUPAC naming scheme is just one of many nomenclatures introduced in an introductory chem course.
The idea of familiar words’ taking on increasingly precise meanings in a scientific context (e.g., “base, “aromatic,” “resonance”); the need to be fluent with interpreting and writing scientific notation; the unusual vocabulary underlying scientific history, with so many “strange terms to fit the strangeness of the thing”– each of these goals constitutes to an extent its own language-learning challenges.
Thus, many vocabulary goals in an introductory course, while similarly crucial, are comparatively “hid[den],” compared to the formal, disciplinary nomenclature.
“Closer reads can /
Build a bridge.”
Asimov notes, in his book’s introduction: “Entering the world of mathematics and science turns into a meeting with a whole realm of new words… The scientific vocabulary is the bridge by which we enter the land, not the wall that keeps us out.”
This theme appeals greatly to me, as someone interested in both chemistry and language, and it was fun last April to devote a week of poems to structuring verses around some of the definitions Asimov recounted. I similarly look forward to revisiting them here.
Chemphasis 