Chapter Twenty
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When it was realised that the different activities were functions of the
same compound, concepts were rethought and united and common
terminology was adopted at a meeting in 1979. The cost of lower
informativeness was offset by the realisation that none of the earlier
names could capture the essence of a given compound’s raison d’etre in
the body.
The two stories presented above draw a rather clear timeline for the
emergence of terms with alphanumeric symbols: their creators and
primary users (specialists in a given branch of science) resort to such
less informative terms when the conceptual content no longer matches
the compositional lexical meaning of terms in use or when no term in
use reflects the conceptual content comprehensively. This operation is
never performed on individual terms and the result is inevitably a
classification. The terms are frequently adopted at an international
meeting or proposed by a panel of experts and the classification aspires
to being used world-wide.
However, there have been cases when alphanumeric elements were
introduced “proactively”, before the underlying concepts changed in a
way that would motivate such decisions. Vitamins (Sager 1990: 92)
used to be identified only by letters as they were distinguished
functionally (as nutritive factors that were not proteins, fats or
carbohydrates) and their chemical structures remained unknown for
some time. Another example is that of the disease viral hepatitis, which
had long been known to have two varieties, differing apparently in the
manner of dissemination and accordingly termed infectious hepatitis and
serum hepatitis. A physician called MacCallum called these viral
hepatitis A and B, respectively, in 1947 before the strains of virus which
cause them had been discovered^6 (Online source 4). The respective
viruses were identified in 1973 and 1970. It later came to light that some
cases of viral hepatitis were not associated with either of those viruses
and the term non-A non-B hepatitis was coined as a concept of
exclusion. In the 1980’s three new viruses were discovered, their names
incorporating the letters C to E. Thus, now there are 5 types of hepatitis
virus causing liver disease, marked A to E. The convenience of using
such short distinctive elements again hides some conceptual complexity
which would make it difficult to find more analytical names for these
types of virus. Hepatitis C virus infection is always associated with
hepatitis A infection and hepatitis D infection accompanies hepatitis B(^6) http://web.stanford.edu/group/virus/1999/tchang/history.htm