https://www.rd.com/culture/confusing-british-phrases/
I could not guess 99%!
I could not guess 99%!
You're having a giraffe!These are all run of the mill expressions, try some cockney rhyming slang that will really mash your swede.
There are lots of elements ending in -ium, many of those having the -nium suffix. For -inium, we have gadolinium, actinium, protactinium, and einsteinium (which doesn't really count). The only -inum element is platinum. Molybdenum and lanthanum are the only other -num elements.It might be wrong, but I read somewhere that Aluminium, the non-magnetic metal that drinks cans are made from, is actually pronounced correctly by Americans and it is rather the spelling that is wrong. Comes from the building of new names for things and Greek or Latin, and it should not have been an -inium, but rather an -inum. Us British pronounce it correctly as spelled, but it is incorrectly spelled.
It still doesn't make it any easier on my ears when I hear "Aloomin'm".
Sir Humphry made a bit of a mess of naming this new element, at first spelling it alumium (this was in 1807) then changing it to aluminum, and finally settling on aluminium in 1812. His classically educated scientific colleagues preferred aluminium right from the start, because it had more of a classical ring, and chimed harmoniously with many other elements whose names ended in -ium, like potassium, sodium, and magnesium, all of which had been named by Davy.
It's clear that the shift in the USA from -ium to -um took place progressively over a period starting in about 1895, when the metal began to be widely available and the word started to be needed in popular writing. It is easy to imagine journalists turning for confirmation to Webster's Dictionary, still the most influential work at that time, and adopting its spelling. The official change in the US to the -um spelling happened quite late: the American Chemical Society only adopted it in 1925, though this was clearly in response to the popular shift that had already taken place. The International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC) officially standardised on aluminium in 1990, though this has done nothing, of course, to change the way people in the US spell it for day to day purposes.
The -um suffix is consistent with the universal spelling alumina for the oxide (as opposed to aluminia); compare to lanthana, the oxide of lanthanum, and magnesia, ceria, and thoria, the oxides of magnesium, cerium, and thorium, respectively.
In 1812, British scientist Thomas Young[91] wrote an anonymous review of Davy's book, in which he objected to aluminum and proposed the name aluminium: "for so we shall take the liberty of writing the word, in preference to aluminum, which has a less classical sound."[92] This name did catch on: while the -um spelling was occasionally used in Britain, the American scientific language used -ium from the start.[93]
https://www.rd.com/culture/confusing-british-phrases/
I could not guess 99%!