If anyone in your family has ever gotten into learning about your ancestors, tracing their history as far back as possible, and finding documents from the old country, chances are they say their hobby is “geneology.” As a spelling tip, the word is really “genealogy,” as in Friedrich Nietzsche’s book The Genealogy of Morals. (Second helpful spelling tip: To spell the German philosopher’s name, type out N-I-E, then just place your fingers on the keyboard and sneeze.)
Genealogy in this respect is similar to the word for a person who owns and operates an eatery. A guy who owns a restaurant. Do you have it in your head yet? Nope! It’s not “restauranteur,” the word is just “restaurateur.”
The reason people make the mistake about genealogy is that we’re so used to words ending in -ology. There’s a whole podcast called Ologies, with episodes on subjects such as fulminology (the study of lightning, think “fulminate”) and mycology (the study of mushrooms, from the Greek for fungus) and, of course, etymology. Unfortunately, the host is deeply unfunny, so while I find it unlistenable, it is a great place to learn words you’ve never heard before.
And this brings us to dead frogs. No, really. In a real-life case that would inspire Mary Shelley to write a Gothic novel about a doctor named Frankenstein who reanimates dead flesh with electricity to create an emotionally complex monster, the Bolognese research physician Luigi Galvani spent the later part of his career electrifying frog corpses. He had, earlier in his life, written De Ossibus, “On Bones” (think “ossify”). But by the 1780s, he became fascinated with flesh and specifically in the mechanism of how muscles and nerves actually moved. Until Galvani, the prevailing theory of biomechanics (the study of how bodies move) was balloonism.
This is my very favorite word. Balloonism is to bioelectricity, our current theory, as alchemy is to chemistry. Which is to say, it’s defunct, but it’s really cool to learn about. Balloonism posits that we are, basically, hydraulic. Say you want to lift your arm. Under this theory, the way that happens is a bladder of fluid or maybe gas in your armpit would inflate — and then deflate when you lower your arm. If there’s ever a real-world version of a C-3PO, balloonism will probably describe how it moves. More importantly, it’s just extremely funny to see a fundamentally childish phoneme such as “balloon” take a grand, usually ideological or religious, suffix like -ism.
In his Bolognese lab during a lightning storm, electricity in the air, Galvani was cutting into the leg of a dead frog with scissors or a scalpel (reports differ) when the leg kicked. Over the course of a series of experiments using a rudimentary type of 18th-century static electric battery called a Leyden jar, he was able to provoke more kicks and other movements (proving that bioelectricity is the correct theory of biomechanics) and to learn a lot about how metals conduct electricity, too. His colleague and sometimes intellectual opponent, another Italian bioelectricity researcher named Alessandro Volta, got the honor of having the physics unit “the volt” named for him. But however much he might have fulminated about certain disagreements, Volta respected Galvani’s work with electricity so much that he was the first person to coin the eponymic word “galvanize.”
