hello. here on the final day of Cohost, i am going to bring you the bombshell investigative journalism i have been sitting on for five full years now, but have been too lazy to do justice. it's finally time.

there are a bunch of articles out there that will tell you how William Whewell coined the word "scientist" in his review of Mary Somerville's On the Connexion of the Physical Sciences. you should read one of them, because i don't want to recapitulate the whole thing. they claim that it was proposed as an alternative to "man of science" in the face of a woman who clearly knew a thing or two. there's actually fairly weak evidence for that claim. what they don't tell you is that the entire review in which the word first appears is pretty literally a love letter. and that William Whewell is a huge, adorable dork.

if you want to read the whole review from the beginning and understand this for yourself, you can do so here. it's quite long and dense, so you almost certainly want to keep reading and have me do that for you instead. there will be a bunch of images from the important bits of the text as we go.

to understand the situation fully, we've got to establish quite a bit of context regarding Whewell's writing style. he is operating fully in the 19c. digressive mode, and it's truly wonderful. it's so sad that we don't write like this anymore. instead of trying to find a concise way to make your point, you just trust your reader to stay with you and launch into a completely irrelevant story for two paragraphs, full of rich style and flavor that stands on its own as a piece of good writing, and then use it to illustrate your point. it's a beautiful thing, and i've sort of just done it to you in miniature: i don't just really enjoy this technique, it's critical for understanding what he was up to here.

ok so important digression one in the review is here. if you can't read all that i'll gloss it below.

the main thrust of all this is, "there are many bad consequences of the increasing specialization and fragmentation of science. one such problem is the lack of a good catch-all term for practitioners of science in general. i'm going to talk about this for a full page for no apparent reason. another problem is that people lose sight of the interconnected history of their disciplines, and fixing that is what this amazing book is for."

the reason, of course, is just so that he (in the guise, with typical Victorian humorous faux-modesty, of "some ingenious gentleman") can introduce his personal hobby-horse term, "scientist", which he will go on many years later to argue for seriously in contentious magazine letters sections, but which here is presented more or less as a throwaway gag. he does not use the phrase "man of science" in his big list of alternatives, and he makes no reference to Mary's gender in relation to the term, nor does he even apply it to her. i think it's very plausible, as we'll see later, that he did intend it to appeal to her specifically, possibly for gender reasons, but possibly also just to show her how witty he was.

ok. great. so much for the word 'scientist'. now we're ready for the fun part.

i know, that's a lot. but holy shit. holy shit. "men are bumbling overemotional idiots; women are confident and understand thing clearly. but, they're also usually incapable of having profound thoughts. BUT WHEN THEY DO, oh golly, then they are SO good at it folks. the only problem is that there aren't any of those anymore.... except Mary Somerville, the coolest and prettiest and bestest lady of science there has ever been in the history of the whole wide world EXCEPT Hypatia and Agnesi."

huh what. who. what is going on dude.

he then proceeds to tell you who. for a full page. in the middle of his book review. i'm not going to paste in that part but you can read it here. the important bits are that Hypatia was from ancient Greece and was a popular Platonist, but then got brutally murdered due to random politics, and that Agnesi was an Italian prodigy who knew a million languages and published philosophical treatises at 19, but then retired to an order of "Blue Nuns".

ok so remember about this digressive style? we're doing this with no intro other than this intense, uh, flattery, but we're definitely not doing it for no reason. nono, you see, Whewell needs you, the reader, and especially Mrs. Somerville the reader, to definitely know the high points in the mythology of Hypatia and Agnesi. to be prepared for what's coming next.

aaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhh

how can you not just love him. the faux-modest attribution to "these versifiers" as if she had a big fan club. "the depths of a pellucid mind". "though learnéd, popu-LAR." do you SEE how he set you up with all that historical rambling, so that you'd get his cool references?? "the rarity of the occasion rather than the excellence of the article" yeah no shit this is fuckin doggerel and he knows it, but i mean just, wow. two whole love poems. "the brightest jewel of England". right there in the book review. they just don't make 'em like William Whewell anymore, folks.

nor like Mary Somerville! she didn't just write a cool popular science book, she wrote four, and she also did a bunch of science herself. go read about her, she's super awesome.

what i don't know is if she ever saw the review or responded in any way. god i would love to know whether she was charmed or thought he was a creep or what. maybe someday i will figure out where her papers are and comb through them meticulously and discover something amazing and sit on it for five years and then post about it on the last day of a dying social media website.

catch ya’ll later alligators

And with that, that's all my drafts published.

I wish I had more to say at the end of cohost, but I've gone through a lot these past couple of weeks, and I think I need time to digest it before I'm ready to write it all down. My thoughts will be up on the blog.

I'll bump my contact info one more time before I go to bed, but this is probably the last thing I'll be posting on cohost unless I think of something really funny to say real quick.

Anyways. Thank you all. This has been a wonderful time, and I hope we all go on to have so many wonderful times in so many other places.

It's closing time.

Closing Time, open all the doors and let you out into the world.