The Chemical Name Game

Working chemists would much prefer to be left to their own devices to come up with names for the compounds they discover. Names that trip off the tongue, names that twist it. Names that honour colleagues, the famous, home towns and occasionally slime moulds are all much nicer than sticking to the rules. So what’s in a name? as the man asked, and why shouldn’t we keep it trivial?

Read my cynical take on all that is systematic and all that is trivial in the world of chemical nomenclature