Volcanology

The twenty-second entry is o dióxido de enxofre, and the element inside it is one of the few whose native English name still exists while almost nobody uses it. Old English called the yellow mineral brynstan, put together from the word for burning and the word for stone, and the compound was as plain as it sounds. It was what you fetched off a shelf, what caught in the throat, what the ground smelled of near a volcano. Then the learned Latin word arrived, sulphur, and took over every place where the substance had to be named exactly: the apothecary, the chemistry book, and in the end this list, where the gas is « sulphur dioxide ». « Brimstone » was left holding a single phrase, and it is not a chemical one. « Fire and brimstone » belongs to the pulpit and to hell, and « a fire-and-brimstone sermon » names a style of preaching rather than any smell. Portuguese had no native word to lose, because o enxofre comes straight from sulphur. So a reader who meets « brimstone » in English is standing in a sermon, not in a laboratory.