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Pooh-Bah
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Today's "antipyretic" derives, ultimately from Greek "pur" or fire. (This, on authority the Wordsmith email). I wondered if "pure" also derived from "pur." A Sherlock (Mac) search yields the result, from Dictionary.com, that it *may*:
\Pure\, a. [Compar. Purer; superl. Purest.] [OE. pur, F. pur, fr. L. purus; akin to putus pure, clear, putare to clean, trim, prune, set in order, settle, reckon, consider, think, Skr. p? to clean, and perh. E. fire. Cf. Putative.] 1. Separate from all heterogeneous or extraneous matter; free from mixture or combination; clean; mere; simple; unmixed; as, pure water; pure clay; pure air; pure compassion.
I wonder if this is from an obsolete concept of combustion.
I also wondered if "putus," nearer the top of this definition, is related to the Spanish "puta" and, if so, why.
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Carpal Tunnel
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Hiya, insel!  "Purify by fire" is what came into my head when I read your subect title. (Aside: get a load of this quote from today's Word: Friedrich Bayer and Friedrich Weskott were two buddies who set up an international paint and dye company in Germany in 1863. Scientists in 1886 discovered an antipyretic painkiller could be manufactured from the waste of one of the dye products. So, in 1888, the pair set up a pharmaceutical department." I never knew that aspirin was developed from waste, esp. from waste that was likely to be poisonous.) Anyway, except for saying Middle English, Gurunet agrees with your source:
pure (pyʊr)
adj., pur·er, pur·est.
1. Having a homogeneous or uniform composition; not mixed: pure oxygen.
2. Free from adulterants or impurities: pure chocolate.
3. Free of dirt, defilement, or pollution: “A memory without blot or contamination must be . . . an inexhaustible source of pure refreshment” (Charlotte Brontë).
4. Free of foreign elements.
5. Containing nothing inappropriate or extraneous: a pure literary style.
6. Complete; utter: pure folly.
7. Having no faults; sinless: “I felt pure and sweet as a new baby” (Sylvia Plath).
8. Chaste; virgin.
9. Of unmixed blood or ancestry.
10. Genetics. Produced by self-fertilization or continual inbreeding; homozygous: a pure line.
11. Music. Free from discordant qualities: pure tones.
12. Linguistics. Articulated with a single unchanging speech sound; monophthongal: a pure vowel.
13. Theoretical: pure science.
14. Philosophy. Free of empirical elements: pure reason.
[Middle English pur, from Old French, from Latin pūrus.]
pure'ly adv.
pure'ness n.
SYNONYMS pure, absolute, sheer, simple, unadulterated. These adjectives mean free of extraneous elements: pure gold; absolute oxygen; sheer alcohol; a simple substance; unadulterated coffee.
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From the Internet:
Acetylsalicylic acid was first prepared by the German chemist Felix Hoffmann, an employee of Friedrich Bayer & Co., in 1897. It is now the active ingredient in more than 50 over-the-counter preparations; estimates put American consumption at 80 billion tablets annually.
Hippocrates , a Greek for whom the Hippocratic Oath is named, wrote about a bitter powder extracted from willow bark that could ease aches and pains and reduce fevers as long ago as the fifth century B.C. It is also mentioned in texts from ancient Sumeria , Egypt and Assyria . Native American Indians used it for headaches, fever, sore muscles, rheumatism, and chills. The Reverend Edmund Stone , a vicar from Chipping Norton in Oxfordshire England , noted in 1763 that the bark of the english willow was effective in reducing a fever, but his reasoning for that was very much in error.
And the myth of the phoenix seems to be based on idea of
purification by fire.
Dear inselpeter: I tried to send you a PM, but something is goofed up in the PM software. I got a new error message I've
never seen before. Welcome back!
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I also wondered if "putus," nearer the top of this definition, is related to the Spanish "puta" and, if so, why?
No, Fr putain, Sp puta 'whore', and It putto are from Latin puttus 'child'. Meyer-Luebke suggests that the semantics went 'child' to 'bastard, Schandekind' to 'whore'. There's a Latin verb puto, -are 'to cut' which may or may not be related to puto 'to clean, cleanse, purify' which is related to purus. The sense for puto 'to cut' coming from a gardening usage of 'to weed'. So, Pokorny gives three separate roots in PIE: (1) *peu- : *pewe- : *pu(:)- 'to cleanse, purify; refine, clarify; sift, strain' - whence Skt punati 'to purify, cleanse', Latin purus 'clean, pure', purgo 'to make clean or pure, purify', and Irish ur 'fresh; noble'; (2) *pe:u- : *p@u- : *pu(:)- 'to hit; to sharpen'; (3) *po:o- : *p@u- : *pu(:)- 'little, slight, few' perhaps also 'youth, animal young, small animal' *po:(u)-lo-s 'youth, boy' *p@u-ko- 'few'. *pu-tlo-s 'child' : whence Skt putra 'boy', Greek pais, paidis 'child', Latin puer 'boy', puella 'girl', puttus 'child'. Because these roots all look similar, I guess they were posited on semantics.
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wwh pointed me at an earlier thread on pure as a noun meaning dog dung. http://wordsmith.org/board/showthreaded.pl?Cat=&Board=beheadingwords&Number=85701Interesting. The OED derives pure 'dog's dung or other substance used as an alkaline lye for steeping hides (in leather making)'. Also spelled pewer or puer. I think that the puer spelling may have suggested boys, pueri in Latin, but the meaning is from Latin purus 'pure, clean'. Under pure as a verb, is a quotation: "Bating or puring as it is called, is a process by which all but a very small amount of the natural grease is removed from the skin."
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Pokorny gives another root for Greek pur, English fire: *pew@r-, *pur (gen. *pu-n-es). Unfortunately, Latin lacks a word meaning fire that uses this root; it uses ignis (cf. Skt agni) and Greek lacks an adjective pure from the other root, but I note that Latin's sister, Oscan, has pir 'fire', so maybe the could take of purifying fire. In Sanskrit paavana 'purifying' is often used in conjunction with Soma 'the divine elixir' which is associated with the Sun, suurya.
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BTW, Nuncle. When linking to AWAD threads it is possible to truncate the URL after the Number=nnnnn point.
Some browsers will put the entire URL on one line. This will make the entire thread go wide,
necessitating scrolling back and forth for viewers in flat mode. If this is not covered in the Helpful Hints site
linked to in the I&A forum, it should be.
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re: Friedrich Bayer and Friedrich Weskott were two buddies who set up an international paint and dye company in Germany in 1863. Scientists in 1886 discovered an antipyretic painkiller could be manufactured from the waste of one of the dye products. So, in 1888, the pair set up a pharmaceutical department." I never knew that aspirin was developed from waste, esp. from waste that was likely to be poisonous.)
they were working with 'coal tars'-- a sticky residue left over from coke productions (coke is made by heating coal with little or no oxigen present--with out oxigen, the coal can't really 'burn' but it smokes.. the smoke collects and becomes a sticy tar like substance--the coal is changed into coke --which has been purified by the process, and has become 99.9% pure carbon, and the coal tar was at first condidered 'waste')
some englishman (actually thinking about it, i think it was a scot) found you could 'do stuff' with coal tar.. but the germans really took coal tar to the limit, coar tar was one of the great new raw material of the industrial revolution.
dyes (new colors of dye, too) were one of the first products.. The imfamous 'red dye #2' that is now banned from foods--is a good example--it is a early coal tar derivitive.
asprin, and sacherine too... came from coal tars
and in the process of 'fracturing coal tars', chemistry as an industry was born .. (companies like duPont that we now think of as chemical companies started as munnitions companies..they worked with another 'carbon'--charcoal--and Nitrogen--...
in the late 1800, the 'language of science' (at least chemistry) was german. knowing the language was part of a chemist training, since all the really important papers and work were being done in germany.
(previously, latin was the universal language of science, but Newton, (who published in Latin) was one of the last great/famous one to do so)
by the beginning of the 1800's scientists (as pointed out, a new word at the time, and a new 'concept') were writting and publishing in their own languages. but all of them relied on some latin and greek for making up chemical names.
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Pooh-Bah
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In reply to:
(3) *po:o- : *p@u- : *pu(:)- 'little, slight, few' perhaps also 'youth, animal young, small animal' *po:(u)-lo-s 'youth, boy' *p@u-ko- 'few'. *pu-tlo-s 'child' : whence Skt putra 'boy', Greek pais, paidis 'child', Latin puer 'boy', puella 'girl', puttus 'child'.
And from the Sanskrit comes the Indonesian putra (son)and putri (daughter, princess). Putra and putri are also used for mens' and women's sporting events.
Bingley
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