Fertile Virgins and Fissile Breeders: Nuclear Neologisms
E. N. Lockard · American Speech · 1950
ONG before the atomic explosion over Hiroshima on the sixth of August, 1945, the nuclear scientists began affecting the language. As they remade the nucleus, they remade the language. Today, glossaries of the new vocabularies-in biophysics, chemical engineering, instrumentation, reactors, and so forth-are being prepared; and the influence of nuclear science on language is evident in magazines both popular and scholarly, books, newspapers, and day-by-day conversation. A dozen or so of the new expressions are already common in the conversation of the country. Perhaps a few dozen more will become so in the next few years. Most of the rest will gain no greater currency than other technical words of physics and chemistry, than the special language of meteorology or quantum mechanics, but still many of these are likely to demand acquaintance if not familiarity. Most of the new expressions are old words adapted with little extension of meaning to nuclear employment; some are old words more radically changed; and a few are coinages. The commonest two of all, atom(ic) bomb and atomic energy, are, we are told, misnomers, because the explosion originates in the nucleus-it is the nucleus that undergoes fission. It is this distinction that shows in the name of the new unit at the Uni-