Black Phosphorous – the birth of a new wonder material | Hacker News Reader

Black Phosphorous – the birth of a new wonder material

technologyreview.com

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Bullseye hit on a pet peeve of many years: the confusion between phosphorus (a noun) and phosphorous (an adjective).

You mean the difference between the element and the quality of glowing?

The adjective is falling out of usage, so you can assume references are to the first unless you are sure otherwise.

But it could be phosphorus black phosphorus ?

I don't know anyone who uses that stuff, except maybe Hotblack Desiato.

The chemical compounds, for instance, are phosphorous this or that.

(If you speak a romance language, it jumps out at you because the adjective has an extra syllable - e.g. 'fosforo' vs. 'fosforoso'.)

That's true of phosphorous acid (where the name distinguishes it from phosphoric acid), but otherwise English chemical names use the noun form of the positive ion (e.g. phosphorus pentoxide).

Yes, I think the adjective in it's more modern form usually occurs as 'phosphorescent'.

> You mean the difference between the element and the quality of glowing?

Or just something containing/made partly of phosphorus (compounds of phosphorus being the most obvious examples, as @ars says): that's common (though glowing with a phosphorous light does have a lovely cadence)

Oh, God, yes: the only similar example that I see abused as much is callus vs callous.

"...heralding a new era of nanoelectronic devices..."

Did I just miss the previous nano-electronic era?! Where can I get my artificial nano-robotic ever-rejuvenating immune system injection?

I would assume they mean on era containing nano-electronic devices where the previous era did not contain nano-electronic devices.

The output of the previous nano-electronic era might be considered the MEMs accelerometers and rate sensors packed into most smartphones, DLP micro mirrors, etc....

That would be now. The average person owns devices containing billions of components that are tens of nanometers in scale of smaller.

>Did I just miss the previous nano-electronic era?!

You probably made that post using electronic components less than 30nm wide.

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