Talk:thymic

RFV discussion: December 2019–January 2020
Rfv-sense: Of or relating to the herb thyme. There is thymic acid which is related to the plant but that's not "relating to thyme". DTLHS (talk) 02:21, 16 December 2019 (UTC)
 * But it is "of" thyme. As is thymic oil, which I found on an aromatherapy site, but not in any durably archived source. The only compliant uses I can find are for thymic acid, so we should probably just add an entry for thymic acid and leave it at that. Of course, the thymus was ultimately named for the herb, so it is all related, if distantly. Kiwima (talk) 03:56, 16 December 2019 (UTC)
 * With chemical names, the relationship between compounds and the sources of their names is rather tenuous. Thymic acid just happened to be originally isolated from thyme, so got named after it- with a standard -ic ending added. It doesn't really mean much to say that it's an acid that's "thymic". Hydrochloric acid is named after hydrogen and chlorine, but "hydrochloric" isn't an adjective defined as "of or related to hydrogen and chlorine". This is best seen with names such as "sulfuric acid" vs. "sulfurous acid", where you can see that the endings are strictly a matter of scientific nomenclature stemming from the chemical makeup of the compounds. Chuck Entz (talk) 05:51, 16 December 2019 (UTC)
 * It looks actually as if thymic acid was coined by the pharmacist E. Bouilhon as a derivative of earlier : “Ce corps, désigné sous le nom de thymol, et que j'appellerai acide thymique, pour les mêmes raisons qui ont fait changer celui de phénol en acide phénique, ...” (“This compound, known by the name of thymol, and which I shall call thymic acid, for the same reasons that have changed the name of phenol into phenic acid, ...”)  --Lambiam 14:09, 16 December 2019 (UTC)

RFV-failed Kiwima (talk) 20:10, 16 January 2020 (UTC)