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How To Chill With ALGAE

It's easy to overlook algae, the single-celled plants that are at the bottom of most food chains.  When we do see them at all, they are often just green slime on the rocks in a stream.  But there are tens of thousands of varieties including some of the largest seaweed on Earth.

The word is Latin and would be expected to have all the usual endings.  So ALGE or ALGA is a single one of these cells, ALGAE is the whole colony, and all these things are ALGAL life forms.  There is technically a plural ALGAS as well, but it sounds like a more modern "let's not use Latin" variation from folks who don't like -AE endings.  Like the modern "octopuses" for people who forget it was "octopi" when we were growing up.

Chemicals to kill ALGAE are ALGICIDES, they are ALGICIDAL.  Things are like algae but are not technically algae are called ALGOID.  And a viscous substance that can be extracted from brown algae is ALGIN -- it is used as a thickener in foods and paint and many other things, where you may see it listed as ALGINATE or ALGINIC* acid.  MW has this fine example of usage, both of the word and the chemical goop: "At the time, local companies would cut the tops off kelp canopies and extracted algin, a chemical that was used for everything from controlling the foam in beer and making desserts moister."

I thought ALGID would be the same as ALGAL, as in "features of algae", but in fact ALGAL means ... chilly?  Yes, cold.  And coldness can be described as ALGIDITY.

ALGID is from the Latin algere.  An unrelated word with similar letters is GELID (extreme cold) from Latin gelidus (frozen thing).  Merriam-Webster has an interesting piece about our various words for cold. Comically, I never had the word GELID cross my mind until playing modded Minecraft, where one of the classic mods (Thermal Expansion) used famously verbose names for every machine, and their fantasy super-coolant was called "gelid cryotheum", and yeah, that sounds awfully cold.

When I hear the usage examples of "gelidly cold water" it sounds slushy to me.  Maybe it most specifically describes a half frozen slurry of water.  That's crazy cold.  Such a fluid would move GELIDLY due to it high GELIDITY.

GELID is a cousin of GELATIN (from Latin gelare "to freeze"), but let's get back to actual cold.

The actual sensation of feeling cold is known as ALGOR.  And the study of algae is known as ALGOLOGY, but more properly phycology these days. You might even want to be an ALGOLOGIST* when you grow up, but try to never grow up, it's not good for you.  I'm not sure how the Scrabble dictionary has ALGOLOGIES, how can there be more than one study of the same thing?  I don't usually cover words beyond 8 letters, but these get pretty amusing.

Just a new slurry of cool words for you to use.

Like usual, words marked with * are not in the Scrabble dictionary.


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