Persuade me rather to be slave and sumpter / To this detested groom.

Both were pipped to the post in 1888 by the German physicist Heinrich Hertz, a student of Hermann von Helmholtz (himself one of the towering figures of nineteenth-century German physics) who announced to the world that he had found a way of propagating and detecting these long-sought-for electromagnetic waves.

The ochlophobist has but a hard time in London just now, remarked the Daily News on December 5, 1882, and we have known subsequent occasions when we would have thanked the Daily News for that word.

If a site like Huffington Post, which just got funds to pay reporters, publicly eliminates their pseudoscience, HIV denialist, New Age woo-mongers and hires some real science/nature/medicine reporters instead, it is in a position to do the ‘push strategy’ on science.