The Dead Language of Science

Abstract

PROF. F. E. FRITSCH¹ complains of the many new terms encumbering a recent German text. We must all sympathize with his view. But is there not a worse evil in our midst, one to which long use has inured us ? I mean the constant reiteration of dead terms, of decayed verbiage. Prof. Fritsch disinters a sample, the word ‘spireme’, and discusses its use. This word originally (in 1882, according to Wilson) referred to the threads seen in the prophase of a nuclear division, mitosis or meiosis. In England and America it was connected with Œnothera in 1907, and became known as the ‘continuous spireme’ of meiosis. This connexion ended after a period of some confusion in 1932, when the spireme suddenly passed away. By 1934 it had disappeared from Sharp's “Introduction to Cytology”. It is no doubt from the Œnothera connexion that Prof. Fritsch recollects the word and in a meaning to which it was never restricted elsewhere. In Germany its last technical use is found in 1934 (Geitler, “Grundriss der Cytologie”). There also it has since disappeared (Geitler, 1938, “Chromosomenbau”).