Although these changes in the naming of things technical are of no great import, they are particularly galling to someone my age. When you've been calling something a name for six or seven decades only to find that some committee has changed it for reasons that amount to the exercise of self-importance, well, I'm feeling a little left out.
Let's see: One that has annoyed me fairly recently is that centipoise is now referred to as milliPascal-seconds (mPas.s) . They are the same thing. Why, oh why? I've been measuring viscosity for more than seventy years and felt no need to change the terminology. Can't say ferrous and ferric anymore. Gotta be iron one and iron two. Poor chem students can't make the ferrous wheel structural formula joke anymore. I grew up with Angstroms for light wavelength measurements and was sort of put off when everyone started using nanometers. Seems sort of less precise even though it isn't. That literally happened in the space of a month as far as I can determine. There have been an entire panoply of name changes for types of optical glass too numerous to go into here. Who else would care? It's been acetic acid and its compounds acetates for a couple of hundred years, but no, we must have propionic acid and propionates. The names lack character. Make sure you don't put that vinegar on your salad any more; you might become propionated. Oh, the horror! Photographers who use actual film have been using potassium ferricyanide as a bleach or reducer for more than a hundred years, but now they might not be able to find it, because its name has been changed to potassium hexacyanoferrate. What miserable committee came up with that one? If you're an old chem guy, it was more or less the assumption that anything ending in "ate" contained oxygen. You know, sulfate, carbonate, etc. There's no oxygen in potassium ferricyanide. Aw, well, plus ca change. These are the ones that occur to me immediately, but there are a lot more. End of ridiculous rant..... MSF
