Talk:moly cow

Moly cow

Discussion moved from User talk:Smuconlaw.

I was thinking about nominating this as a word of the day, but I can't seem to find any quotes from before around 2010. This author says "originally known as" which makes me suspect there are much earlier uses:

[20] refers to PV Harper, G Andros, K Lathrop, W Siemens, L Weiss, Technetium-99 as a biological tracer, J Nucl Med, 3 (1962), p. 209, which doesn't appear to be archived online. Can you find any earlier citations for this word? DTLHS (talk) 05:30, 9 December 2016 (UTC)

I also couldn't find the 1962 article online, nor found quotations earlier than 2010. (By the way, I added some other quotations to the entry and tidied it up.) — SMUconlaw (talk) 17:29, 9 December 2016 (UTC)

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@Smuconlaw:

Discussion NOT moved from anywhere else, but nevertheless relating to the moved discussion that appears above in this talk section.

   I removed

", probably modelled after holy cow "

(and summarized that edit by "with extreme-prejudicial intent")

after a whole-Web Google search for "molybdenum cow" produced the removed content as a hit, thereby drawing my attention to the otherwise obscure and perhaps unreviewed wikt entry.

   I am personally a witness to the fact that "moly", short for "molybdenum" (which is pronounced with the first vowel as a schwah rather than a long-O),* and pronounced like the human nickname "Molly" (and not like in the rhyme "Holy moly" or "Holy moley"), was already routinely used, c. 1970, in integrated-circuit-fabrication R&D; it seems to me clear that the use of "probably" in our colleague's contrib reflects nothing more than

• the reasoning "Wow, what's the odds of 'holy cow' and 'moly cow' being spelled analogously just by chance?

without consideration of the fact that the association of "milking" (and perhaps even of "breeding", in notional "w:breeder reactors") with molybdenum suffices to explain everything without cause for implicit expressions of surprise. "Probably" is utterly unsuitable for describing what must be a desperate shot at insight, in the absence of a suitable source like the current (Feb 2017) issue of Scientific American, "Blind Medicine", pp. 68-71. The 'graph that is split between the two columns of p. 71 and includes the sentence

(Because of the milking process, these canisters are whimsically dubbed "moly cows.")

should suffice to erase any expectation that the whimsy involved might be about the lowest form of humor. That whimsy is in fact about analogizing gradual production and consumption of a radioisotope in a metaphor about our bovine friend Bessie. The best defense that can be offered for "probably" is that the removed content has so limp an adverb that only fools were likely to be influenced by an entry where it stood unsupported.
--Jerzy•t 08:34 & :52, 27 January 2017 (UTC)

   * PS:
   After writing the above, i checked, in an excess of caution, w:Webster's Second International (1958 ed'n, 3 years before they first published the Third, from which the subsequent Collegiates are abridged). It prescribes (rather than long O or schwa) a sound in "molybdenum" that it transcribes as o surmounted with sort of a "broken plus sign" (specifically the one with the bottom "arm" missing). The examples given in its front matter are the first O in each of "obey", "tobacco", "propose", and "another"; out of my mouth, "obey" features something more O-like than a schwa, while the other three examples match my schwa-ish pronunciation of the O in "molybdenum".
   IMO, to the degree that Wbstr II's prescription for "molybdenum" differs from what i have advocated above, it is likely to reflect its status as a fairly new, and at least until the World Wars, quite obscure material: Webster II presumably had occasion to update that entry's lemmas once or twice, but the frequency of its mention may have been so low that what now amounts to a pedantic (long-O) pronunciation was more common until peace (and controlled nuclear fission) could produce civilian uses for the element, and a bit more occasion to use its slang nickname. Even so, i don't think i heard it mentioned, except in w:Tom Lehrer's The Elements, between 1970 and seeing it in print last week!
--Jerzy•t 08:34 & :52, 27 January 2017 (UTC)