An upcoming community art show entitled "Foiled" at The Back House Gallery, in downtown Petaluma, opening Feb 10th, 2018 is focused on an original artistic commentary regarding love in these new and different times.
"It seems as if so many things are having a reset these days, with love (and certainly lust) being one of them," says the shows curator, Drew Washer. "The other part of the work is foil. We love doing shows around types of materials. Fairly ubiquitous these days, foil is a humble, yet beautiful and versatile material.
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In my native UK, we call it tin foil in its most common form of everyday use, aluminium in its wider applications. It took me a while to adjust to the American pronunciation and spelling, even then, mostly to avoid the inevitable jokes about the many oddities of British versus American English.
According to dictionary.com a little back story on this particular peculiarity of Aluminum being the American spelling and aluminium the British spelling for this ductile, malleable silver-white metal
"Its discoverer, Sir H. Davy, first called the metal alumium but then modified the word. This is one of a number of spelling differences between British and American English, such as: aeroplane/airplane, aesthetics/esthetics, colour/color, encyclopaedia/encyclopedia, paralyse/paralyze."
On further digging, the BBC explains how English chemist Sir Humphry Davy made a bit of a saga in naming this new element, at first spelling it alumium in 1807 then changing it to aluminum and finally settling on aluminium in 1812. "His classically educated scientific colleagues preferred aluminium right from the start, because it had more of a classical ring, and chimed harmoniously with many other elements whose names ended in -ium, like potassium, sodium, and magnesium, all of which had been named by Davy."
So, is either pronunciation right, or wrong? To clarify: the grammarist.com says: "Aluminum is the American and Canadian spelling for the silver-white metallic element (number 13 on the periodic table) abundant in the earth’s crust. Aluminium is the preferred spelling outside North America. Neither term is superior to the other, and both are etymologically and logically justifiable. Aluminum is older, while aluminium is more consistent with other element names such as helium, lithium, magnesium, and so on (though let’s not forget there are other -um elements—molybdenum, tantalum, and platinum)."
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The Back House Gallery is located at 46 Kentucky Street, Petaluma.
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