Distilling spirits

The tenth entry is o metanol, the fraction taken off at the start and set aside, and the name it carries is worth unpicking. English first named the substance after the thing it was distilled from. Heated wood gave it off, so it was « wood spirit », « wood naphtha », « wood alcohol », and every one of those names told a reader where it came from. Chemistry then replaced them. In the eighteen-thirties two chemists built the word méthylène out of two Greek pieces, méthy, wine, and hýlē, wood; from méthylène came « methyl », and from « methyl » came « methanol ». The new name says exactly what the old one said, wine and wood together, but says it where nobody can see it. One trace of the older layer survives in everyday English: « methylated spirits », and the bottle in every hardware shop that people call « meths ». Portuguese keeps o metanol beside o álcool metílico, and neither of those shows the tree either. So the one cut nobody may drink is named, twice over, after a drink.