Carl Linnaeus was a Swedish scientist in the 1700s who invented the modern system of classifying and naming organisms. It’s thanks to him that we can not only call a hedgehog a hedgehog, but also identify it as a mammal in the family “erinaceinae.” And likewise with virtually every plant and animal on earth. Linnaeus was recognized during his own lifetime, with luminaries like Jean-Jacques Rousseau saying “I know no greater man on earth,” as well as Sweden bestowing nobility on him. After he was titled, he was also known as “Carl von Linné.”
That name change was important in the late 1700s in London, when James Edward Smith, a botanist, founded the “Linnean Society of London.” It was dedicated to natural history (it’s the oldest such society in the world). Without the change from “Linnaeus” to “von Linné,” the society would have had to have been called the “Linnaean Society”, thus confusing countless thousands who would have had to spell it.
One of the eventual members of the Linnean Society was William Kirby, who was a good example of the kind of educated country gentleman who, in 18th and 19th century England, spent their abundant leisure time in advancing the sciences, which were still new at the time. Kirby met Smith himself in 1791, when Kirby was 32, and stayed in contact for the remainder of Smith’s life.
Kirby was eager for guidance in his studies, which focused on entomology (the study of insects) because his primary activity was not science, but religion. He was a parson in Barnham, and kept that job for 68 years. He was a prolific writer, and once he was comfortably enmeshed in the English scientific community, wrote and delivered loads of technical papers. His first significant scientific book was “Monographia Apum Angliae” (Monograph on the Bees of England) in 1802.
He followed that with the four volume “Introduction to Entomology,” which began in 1808, with the final volume published in 1826. And that’s the set we’re interested in here. The first edition of the first volume appeared in 1815, and the preface includes this: “The Terminology…to avoid the barbarism of a word compounded of Latin and Greek; they would beg to call the Orismology of the science.”
Now, entomology is all well and good (and Kirby’s Introduction to it was a big success, staying in print for at least seven editions), but it’s not, after all, etymology, which is much better. What Kirby (and his co-author, William Spence) were complaining about was the word “terminology.” They objected to the way the first part of the word, “terminus,” came from Latin while the second part, “ology,” came from Greek. So they invented “orismology” because its derivation is entirely Greek. It’s based on “horismos,” which means the marking of a boundary. Of course, like most people insisting on purity of ancestry — whether of words, racehorses, or humans — they made simple, elementary, and you might even say stupid mistakes. They dropped the “h” for no reason whatsoever, ending up with “orismology” instead of “horismology.”
Although the “Introduction to Entomology” went on to success and popularity, the same was never true of “orismology.” The word was never widely used, and its only appearance lately was in the US National Spelling Bee in 2001. Kirby continued his writing, dividing his efforts between religion and biology, and even tried to combine them in works like “On the Power, Wisdom, and Goodness of God as Manifested in the Creation of Animals” in 1835. But as far as anyone knows, he never again tried inventing new words. Like the bees — the various sorts living in England, not the spelling ones — he stuck to what he was good at.
