There is a certain fascination associated with words. The manipulation
of strings of symbols according to mutually accepted rules allows a
language to express history as well as to formulate challenges for the
future. But language changes as old words are used in a new context and
new words are created to describe changing situations. How many words
has the computer revolution alone added to languages? "Inorganometallic"
is a word you probably have never encountered before. It is one created
from old words to express a new presence. A strange sounding word, it is
also a term fraught with internal contradiction caused by the accepted
meanings of its constituent parts. "In- organic" is the name of a
discipline of chemistry while "metallic" refers to a set of elements
constituting a subsection of that discipline. Why then this Carrollian
approach to entitling a set of serious academic papers? Organic, the
acknowledged doyenne of chemistry, is distinguished from her brother,
inorganic, by the prefix "in," i. e., he gets everything not organic.
Organometallic refers to compounds with carbon-metal bonds. It is
simple! Inorganometallic is everything else, i. e., compounds with
noncarbon-metal element bonds. But why a new term? Is not inorganic
sufficient? By virtue of training, limited time, resources, co-workers,
and so on, chemists tend to work on a specific element class, on a
particular compound type, or in a particular phase. Thus, one finds
element-oriented chemists (e. g.