"Greg Goss" > wrote in message
...
> "Ophelia" > wrote:
>
>>
>>"Joseph Michael Bay" > wrote in message
...
>>
>> no matter how much yttrium it has.
>>>
>>> (That's a made up example, by the way. I'm pretty sure nobody
>>> needs yttrium in their diet. I just like saying "yttrium").
>>
>>LOL.. so .. what is it?
>
> There is an obscure small ghost town in scandinavia named Ytterby.
> Because ores from near it were studied in a certain era of the age of
> chemical discovery, there are FOUR elements named after that obscure
> ghost town. The most important attribute of the "lanthanide"
> elements is that they are almost entirely the same as each other. If
> you discover an element that is essentially identical to the next
> element over, then how do you come up with a name for it? For several
> of these, letters were dropped from the previous element. Ytterbium.
> Yttrium. Terbium. Erbium.
>
> Or something like that. I'm disconnected from the net at the moment
> and don't remember my chemistry well enough to look it up. And I'm
> not at home to look it up in reference works.
Thank you very much for your explanations Greg
best
O