silicon

The “Googleplex,” in Mountain View, California, Silicon Valley

14 February 2025

Silicon is a chemical element with atomic number 14 and the symbol Si. It is a hard, brittle, crystalline metalloid with a blue-gray luster. It is the eighth most common element in the earth’s crust and has a wide variety of uses, perhaps the most common being in glass, ceramics, cement, and as a semiconductor in the electronics industry. It is also the basis for the synthetic polymers known as silicones.

While silicon crystals and their role as a component of glass and ceramics were known to the ancients, it wasn’t until the late eighteenth century that it was recognized as a distinct chemical element. It acquired a number of names in various languages, including le silex (1777), terra silicea (1779) and silica (1787). These all have as their root the Latin silex, meaning flint, which is a form of silicon dioxide. In 1808, Humphry Davy dubbed it silicium, although he was unable to isolate the element and determine its chemical properties.

In 1817, Thomas Thomson recognized that the element had properties like that of boron and carbon and named it silicon:

The base of silica has been usually considered as a metal, and called silicium. But as there is not the smallest evidence for its metallic nature, and as it bears a close resemblance to boron and carbon, it is better to class it along with these bodies, and to give it the name of silicon.

But the name silicium persisted through much of the nineteenth century before silicon became the universally accepted name.

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Sources:

Davy, Humphry. “Electro-Chemical Researches, on the Decomposition of the Earths” (30 June 1808).  Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, 98. London: W. Bulmer, 1808, 333–70 at 353. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Miśkowiec, Pawel. “Name Game: The Naming History of the Chemical Elements—Part 1—From Antiquity till the End of 18th Century.” Foundations of Chemistry. 1 November 2022. DOI: 10.1007/s10698-022-09448-5.

Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, silicon, n., silica, n., silicium, n., silex, n., silicone, n.

Thomson, Thomas. A System of Chemistry, fifth edition, vol. 1 of 4. London: Baldwin, Cradock, and Joy, 1817, 252. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Photo credit: Austin McKinley, 2013. Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license.

rawdog

12 February 2025

The American Dialect Society selected rawdog as its 2024 Word of the Year (WOTY). The word is interesting not only because it was, at the time of selection, a popular and trending slang term, but it is of linguistic note in that its meaning has gone through a series of semantic changes over the course of its life, broadening in meaning.

When rawdog entered into general slang discourse it had a meaning relating to engaging in sexual intercourse without a condom. (There was an older sense in Black slang meaning to abuse or cause harm.) But within a few years it broadened in meaning to mean to engage in an activity without preparation. This broadening occurred long before most people think it did. Furthermore, many people associate the term with queer discourse, but the evidence shows that early use was by no means limited to the queer community, getting its start in Black slang before spreading into musical discourse via hip-hop, and then into use more generally.

The oldest known use of the term is recorded by Green’s Dictionary of Slang in a Black slang glossary prepared for Los Angeles police officers, Todd R. Houser’s 1985 Central Slang: A Police Officer’s Training Guide:

raw dog To treat someone worse than a dog. To bring cruel abuse and heartless harm to bear.

The sexual sense seems to be in place a decade later when rap disc jockey Tony Touch released his 1995 mix tape Hip Hop 43 which contains the line, “Giving it to you rawdog, baby.” I can’t find the wider context for this line, but it would seem to refer to unprotected sex. The progression from to abuse or cause harm to engage in unprotected sex seems rather obvious, especially given the AIDS pandemic in the 1980s and 90s, before effective treatments for the disease were available.

But the sexual sense is unambiguously in place by 1999, when it appears in rapper DMX’s song “Good Girls, Bad Guys” on the album …And Then There Was X:

Turn a church girl to a straight Ruff Ryder
Take her to the Ramada make it an all nighter
Oh no, I only go to the Swiss hotel)
Fuckin with me? I have you in the back of the Chevelle
Like what (what) hittin it raw dogg in the butt
You was good this mornin, but tonight you a slut

If one searches Usenet for instances of term, one finds hundreds of hits from the 1990s for raw dog being used as a label for various musical projects and artists, but exactly what meaning or meanings this label was intended to convey is unclear.

But within five years of DMX’s song, the sexual sense of rawdog underwent its first broadening in meaning. Connie Eble’s Campus Slang for 2004 defines the verb as “to engage in wild fun, particularly sex: I totally rawdogged her.”

For further examples of the progression of the shift in meaning one needs to turn to Urbandictionary.com. Now, Urbandictionary is hardly an authoritative source, but when used carefully, it can be a source for evidence of slang use. And on 26 December 2005 a user posted the earliest known use of the broadened sense of to engage in some activity unprepared:

To go into something unprepared, without thinking

I went into that test Raw Dog!

What follows is a series of posts to Urbandictionary that give various specific applications of and even more broadening of the term’s meaning. On 26 November 2006 a user applied as an adjective referring to uncooked food:

Food that is uncooked.

I aint eatin that raw dog hamburger. Fuck dat shit.

On 19 October 2007 we get this even more general sense:

go all out, throw caution to the wind, go all the way

Noah went raw dog and decided to get a Bachelor's of Science in Engineering rather than a weak Bachelor's of Applied Science.

On 1 July 2009 we get a specific application of the noun rawdog that links back to the older unprotected sex meaning:

#1- v. sexual intercourse without using a condom.

#2- v. The act of masturbating with no pornography.

#1-
Dane: “Mary, I don't have a condom.”
Mary: “Oh thats OK just stick it in raw dog!”

#2-
Mike: “Oh dude my computers been broken for like a week.”
Alex: “Shit dude, no porn!?”
Mike: “Nah!”
Alex: “So have you jerked it?”
Mike: “Yeah man, fucking raw dogin it all week.”

Not all of Urbandictionary’s entries reflect a broadening of the sense. An entry from 18 November 2009 records a semantic shift of the unprotected sex sense from verb to noun, a condomless penis, although the example sentence given doesn’t match the definition:

a clean, condomless, steamy, piping hot dick ready to fuck a bitch

woman: oh my god just put it in me!!!
man: i cant i seem to be lacking a condom
woman: i dont care! put it in raw dog!!

Urbandictionary has a 2 February 2010 entry for the phrase raw dog and bail:

To completely exploit someone or something in a quick and greedy manner, usually involving theft, consumption, or abuse of someones good will.

Adam: "Freshman kegger down the street."
Bob: "Let's raw dog and bail that shizz then go to the bar."

"I only offered you a slice and now half my pizza is gone, way to raw dog and bail it."

Subsequent entries define the phrase to mean to engage in unprotected sex and then ghost one’s partner. It seems likely that despite the more general sense of raw dog and bail being recorded first, the sexual sense of the phrase is the older one.

A 5 January 2010 entry has this definition and example:

eating food with your hands while shitfaced

"dude, i was so hammered new year's eve I was raw dog-n' that mac 'n cheese right outta the pot"

And on 15 July 2010, one Urbandictionary contributor, Jwk93, posted three entries, giving various examples of the general sense of rawdog:

To enter blindly into an unfamiliar or unsafe situation, with little regard for any harmful potential consequences.

Hank: Hey, let's go skydiving.
Sam: But the instructor isn't certified.
Hank: Dude, calm down. Let's raw dog it, and don't worry, we'll be totally safe.

Terry: Excited for the party?
Bill: No. We weren't invited, and the host actually wants us dead.
Terry: Woah now -- relax, bro. Just raw dog it and you'll be fine.

The second:

to put forth a lackluster effort.

Gus procrastinated so much on his term paper that he was forced to raw dog it the night before it was due.

And the third:

to undergo a task, paying little attention to detail.

Jon: Hey Betty, would you make me a sandwich?
Betty: Sure, what would you like on it?
Jon: Doesn't matter. Just raw dog it.

Hairdresser: Do you care how I cut your hair?
Samantha: No, just raw dog it, I only have 20 minutes.

On 12 April 2011 we have this entry from a contributor going by the handle theduderuns, indicating that the term had a specific meaning to the running community:

(verb) To run barefoot.

1. Screw shoes I'd rather raw dog it.

2. I saw a dude rawdogging through midtown manhattan today.

We get this on 23 June 2011:

The act of not giving a fuck about consequences, just living life.

Casey: Yo I hit 120 in my car the other day.
"The Raw Dog Crew": Thats so Raw Dog.

And another very specific application of the term on 14 June 2012:

v. making direct contact with a public toilet.

They were out of sanitation wraps so I had to raw dog the toilet.

There is this example from 5 June 2013 that rather obviously and inventively extends the sense of unprotected sex to protecting one’s smartphone from damage:

Not protecting one's iPhone/smartphone with a case.

Generally considered a risky practice, it appeals to reckless individuals who think a bare phone feels and looks better.

“Even though I bought an Otter Box, I never use it. I don't like how it feels when I try and slide it into my pocket.”

“I was raw dogging it at the bars this weekend. I woke up with some weird-looking little bumps on my screen. I rubbed it down with alcohol, so I think I'll be OK.”

Applications of rawdogging to uncooked food continue to remain relevant. Here is one from 3 September 2014:

To eat an uncooked food.

Aren't you going to cook that pop tart? You're not raw dogging it are you?

An entry from 5 May 2015:

Ordering a sheet cheese pizza with uncooked pepperoni

“Yo let me get two raw dogs for delivery”

And another from 22 March 2018:

eating a meat product, say a hamburger or hot dog without a bun

“Ugh, you took the last bun?! Guess I'll have to raw dog this hot dog then...”

The sexual sense of rawdog may have originally been inspired by the AIDS pandemic, but decades later the Covid-19 pandemic had its own form of rawdogging. From 26 January 2021:

When a person goes to public places without any sort of face mask on while in the middle of a pandemic.

"Hey, do you want to go inside the store for some groceries?"
"Nah man. Too many people raw dogging the air."
"You're right. We'll just do a pick-up order"

Finally there is this entry from 9 February 2022, which is unusual for Urbandictionary in that it was clearly written by a linguist or lexicographer:

To perform any act recklessly or without preparation. A semantic broadening of the original sense of unprotected intercourse based on connotations of risk. In response to interrogatives, it is often preceded by exclamation “nah”, a vocative such as “man”/”dude” and elision “Imma”.

“Are you studying for Macy's test?”
“Nah, man. Imma raw dog it.”

“I considered purchasing the per diem rental car insurance, but opted instead to raw dog it.”

Rawdog is an excellent example of how a slang term can change in meaning as it is adopted by a wider community and how terms and their senses are often much older than most people think they are.

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Sources:

Friedman, Nancy. “Word of the Week: Rawdog.” Fritinancy (blog), 13 January 2025.

DMX. “Good Girls, Bad Guys” (lyrics). Genius.com, n.d.

Green’s Dictionary of Slang, n.d., s.v. rawdog, adj., raw dog, v., raw dogg, n.

Urbandictionary.com, s.v. raw dog, accessed 17 January 2025.

Photo credit: Corode, 2013. Wikimedia Commons. Public domain image.

moonstruck

A stained-glass window in the Church of St Thomas the Apostle, Killinghall, North Yorkshire, England, depicted Matthew 4:24 in which Jesus heals the sick

10 February 2025

We all know that people in love sometimes act insane, and that is the concept behind the modern use of the word moonstruck. Someone who is moonstruck is out of their mind with love. But this was not always the case; the word originally simply referred to insanity. The idea that the phases of the moon could trigger mental illness is an old one—English use of the word lunatic dates to the late thirteenth century—and that’s where the concept of being moonstruck comes from.

Moonstruck is recorded as early as 1647 in a sermon by John Arrowsmith, in which he expounds on the metaphor of the moon as a symbol of the decadent world—full of spots, representing sin; subject to change; and:

The cause of many diseases, especially of the falling-sicknesse. Scripture speaking of such as were troubled therewith, calls them σεληνιαζομένους Lunaticks or moon-struck, Mat.4.24.

Σεληνιαζομένους (seliniazoménous), found in the original Greek of the gospel, literally means moonlit. The full text of Matthew 4:24, in the 1611 Authorized (King James) Version reads:

And [Jesus’s] fame went throughout all Syria: and they brought unto him all sick people that were taken with divers diseases and torments, and those which were possessed with devils, and those which were lunatick, and those that had the palsy; and he healed them.

The New Revised Standard Version translates the Greek word as “epileptics.”

Moonstruck also appears in John Milton’s 1674 version of Paradise Lost, Book 11, in a vision shown by Michael to Adam of the consequences of his and Eve’s indiscretion with the forbidden fruit:

                                    Immediately a place
Before his eyes appeared, sad, noysom, dark,
A Lazar-house it seemd, wherein were laid
Numbers of all diseas’d, all maladies
Of gastly Spasm, or racking torture, qualmes
Of heart-sick Agonic, all feavorous kinds,
Convulsions, Epilepsies, fierce Catarrhs,
Intestin Stone and Ulcer, Colic pangs,
Daemoniac Phrenzie, moaping Melancholie,
And Moon-struck madness, pining Atrophie,
Marasmus, and wide-wasting Pestilence,
Dropsies, and Asthma’s, and Joint-racking Rheums.

But in the mid-nineteenth century the meaning of moonstruck shifted and acquired an association with love and romance. To the Victorians, to be moonstruck was to be madly in love, combining the idea of madness with a moonlit lovers’ tryst. Charles Dickens used the word in association with love when he describes the title character of his 1850 novel David Copperfield:

The first thing I did, on my own account, when I came back, was to take a night-walk to Norwood, and, like the subject of a venerable riddle of my childhood, to go “round and round the house, without ever touching the house,” thinking about Dora. I believe the theme of this incomprehensible conundrum was the moon. No matter what it was, I, the moon-struck slave of Dora, perambulated round and round the house and garden for two hours, looking through crevices in the palings, getting my chin by dint of violent exertion above the rusty nails on the top, blowing kisses at the lights in the windows, and romantically calling on the night, at intervals, to shield my Dora—I don't exactly know what from, I suppose from fire. Perhaps from mice, to which she had a great objection.

Shortly afterwards, Matthew Arnold, in his 1852 Tristram and Isuelt, uses the word in the same sense:

All red with blood the whirling river flows,
The wide plain rings, the daz’d air throbs with blows.
Upon us are the chivalry of Rome—
Their spears are down, their steeds are bath’d in foam.
“Up, Tristram, up,” men cry, “thou moonstruck knight!
What foul fiend rides thee? On into the fight!”
—Above the din her voice is in my ears—
I see her form glide through the crossing spears.—
Iseult! . . . .

The older sense of plain madness and lunacy quickly dropped away and moonstruck came to mean dazed by love.

There are some other senses of moonstruck based on various superstitions about the effects of moonlight. Some believed that sleeping in moonlight could cause blindness, and those afflicted with this supposed moon-blindness were sometimes called moonstruck. Nineteenth-century sailors believed that the tropical moon would spoil fish, and said fish were said to be moonstruck. Of course, it was the tropical heat, and not the moonlight, that caused the fish to spoil, but superstition seldom has any truck with common sense. And various and sundry other afflictions were attributed to being struck by moonlight. Most of these are seldom found today, but you may run across them if you read enough nineteenth century literature.

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Sources:

Arnold, Matthew. “Tristram and Iseult.” In Empedocles on Etna and Other Poems. London: B. Fellowes, 1852, 120–21. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Arrowsmith, John. A Great Wonder in Heaven. London: R. L. for Samuel Man, 1647, 19. Early English Books Online (EEBO).

The Bible, Authorized King James Version. Oxford World Classics. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1997, Matthew 4:24.

Dickens, Charles. David Copperfield, London: Chapman & Hall, 1850, chapter 33, 374–75. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Milton, John. Paradise Lost. London: S. Simmons, 1974, Book 11, lines 477–88, 299–300. Early English Books Online (EEBO).

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, December 2002, s.v. moonstruck, adj.

The New Oxford Annotated Bible, augmented third edition (NRSV). Oxford: Oxford UP: 2007, Matthew 4:24.

Photo credit: Storye book, 2016. Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.

selenium

“Selene,” Albert Aublet, 1880, oil on canvas

7 February 2025

Selenium is a chemical element with atomic number 34 and the symbol Se. It can appear as a red powder; a vitreous, black solid; or a gray metallic solid. It is rarely found in nature in a pure form, found usually in metal sulfide ores where it takes the place of sulfur. It is a chalcogen, a group that includes oxygen, sulfur, and tellurium. Selenium is toxic, although trace amounts are necessary for life as we know it. It has a variety of uses in industry, including production of glass, brass alloys, batteries, solar cells, and photoconductors.

Selenium was discovered by Jöns Jacob Berzelius and Johan Gottlieb Gahn in 1817. Berzelius named the element after Selene, the Greek goddess of the moon, paralleling the naming of tellurium, which was named after the earth. When burned, selenium gives off an odor reminiscent of horseradish, a similar odor to that exuded by tellurium, leading the chemist to initially think he was dealing with a tellurium compound. Subsequent work convinced him that his initial assessment was incorrect. Berzelius announced the discovery in a series of letters sent to chemists throughout Europe, which were subsequently published in various scientific journals. Here is an extract of one of those letters, dated 27 January 1818:

Da das reine Tellurium diesen Geruch nicht verbreitet, weder im metallischen noch im oxydirten Zustande, so vermuthe ich, dass die Tellurerze etwas von diesem Stoffe enthalten möchten. Diese Vermuthung gab mir Veranlassung den neuen Stoff Selenium, vom griechischen Namen des Mondes, zu nennen. Die Vermuthung mag sich nun bestätigen oder nicht, so kann er doch diesen Namen behalten, weil er doch einen Namen braucht.

(Since pure tellurium does not give off this smell, either in the metallic or oxidized state, I suspect that the tellurium ores may contain some of this substance. This suspicion led me to name the new substance selenium, from the Greek name for the moon. Whether or not this suspicion is confirmed, it can still keep this name because it needs a name.)

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Sources:

Berzelius, Jöns Jacob. “Ein neues mineralisches Alkali und ein neues Metall” (27 January 1818). Journal für Chemie und Physik, 21, 1817, 44–48 at 47–48. HathiTrust Digital Archive. (Berzelius’s letter is dated 1818, while the volume of the journal is dated 1817; presumably the 1817 volume was published late.)

Miśkowiec, Pawel. “Name Game: The Naming History of the Chemical Elements—Part 2—Turbulent Nineteenth Century.” Foundations of Chemistry. 8 December 2022. DOI: 10.1007/s10698-022-09451-w.

Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989. s.v. selenium, n.

Image credit: Albert Aublet, 1880; photo by Sotheby’s, New York, 2007. Wikimedia Commons. Public domain image as a mechanical reproduction of a public domain work.

mind-meld

Evil Spock conducts a mind-meld with Good Dr. McCoy in the Star Trek: TOS episode “Mirror, Mirror.”

5 February 2025

Science fiction is a productive source of neologisms. Sometimes what is envisioned in fiction enters the lexicon before science makes it a reality, and sometimes futuristic and fantastic concepts that can never be real enter the language through the genre. When we talk of the intersection between science fiction and popular culture, conversation inevitably turns to Star Trek. The original television series ran from 1966–69 and bequeathed to us any number of spin-off series, movies, cartoons, and books, but it also left us with an enriched vocabulary. Alongside phasers and warp speed, the TV show gave us the mind-meld.

In the TV series, mind-melding is an ability possessed by the telepathic race of Vulcans to join the thoughts of two individuals. The 1968 book The Making of Star Trek describes the ability thusly:

Another unique Vulcan ability exhibited by Spock is a type of ESP that the Vulcans refer to as “mind-melding.” He can merge his mind with that of another intelligence and read its thoughts. While he will use this ability when circumstances make it absolutely necessary, he dislikes doing so because the process requires emotional contact as well, thus robbing him of his stoic mask and revealing too much of his inner self. The physical cost of this process is also quite high.

In the series Star Trek: Enterprise (2001–05), set several generations before the original series, mind-melding is portrayed as an ability that is forbidden, practiced only by a cult considered to be subversive. Evidently in the intervening generations its use became permitted, although still not widespread. 

The term first appears in the script for the episode “Elaan of Troyius.” The script for the episode was penned by J. M. Lucas on 23 May 1968, before The Making of Star Trek was published. The episode aired on 20 December:

Mr. Spock, […] he refuses to talk. I’ll need you for the Vulcan mind-meld.

Ironically, while it is named in the episode, Spock does not actually conduct a mind-meld in it.

While the script for “Elaan of Troyius” is the earliest known use of the term, the episode “Spectre of the Gun” (aired 25 October 1968) was the first on-air use of the term, when Kirk refers to it as the Vulcan mind-meld.

These were the first uses of mind-meld, but it wasn’t the first use of the concept in the series, which went by a variety of names. Spock’s telepathic ability appears without a name several times in the series’s first season. It is dubbed the Vulcan mind probe in the second-season episode “The Changeling” (aired 29 September 1967). In the episode “Patterns of Force” (aired 16 February 1968), Kirk also refers to it as the Vulcan mind probe. And in “By Any Other Name” (aired 23 February 1968), Kirk repeats Vulcan mind probe, while Dr. McCoy calls it a mind touch. Spock calls it the Vulcan mind fusion in the third-season episode “The Paradise Syndrome” (aired 4 October 1968). And In “Is There in Truth No Beauty?” (aired 18 October 1968) Spock refers to it as a mind link eleven times, more uses than all the other names for the ability in the original series, the movies starring the cast of the original series, and the series Star Trek: The Next Generation put together. The ability is featured twice in the animated series (1973–75), both times called the Vulcan mind touch. It is not until Star Trek: The Motion Picture (1979) does mind-meld become cemented in the Star Trek universe as the name for the ability. No other names for the ability are used in the Star Trek universe after this.

While the word mind-meld is original to Star Trek, the TV series did not invent the concept. In his 1954 short story The Censors, J. F. Burke uses the term mind link to describe a similar ability. Other writers have used the phrase mind link since, but it was Star Trek that brought the concept to and cemented it in the public consciousness.

Within a decade after its appearance in the TV series, mind-meld was being used to refer to a deep understanding or non-verbal communication between two people. It appears in the pages of the Washington Star on 21 November 1976:

On Broadway, “Equus”—they highly stylized dramatization of the mind meld between a psychiatrist and his young patient—is the artistic and commercial dramatic success of the year.

One of the signs that a word has caught on and become a permanent part of the lexicon is when it becomes another part of speech. Mind-meld has become a verb, appearing as early as 1976 in a cartoon parody of a science fiction fan convention, Phil Foglio’s, And Then ... New York:

We’re backstage still waiting for Leonard Nimoy, who has gone thru 3 albums, mind-melded with 4 Trekkies and a Wells Fargo guard, faith healed a sick cat, and is halfway thru his current book.

The verb appears in a science-fiction-but-non-Star Trek context in Sharyn McCrumb’s 1988 superbly named Bimbos of the Death Sun, a mystery novel set at a sci-fi convention. In the passage in question an organizer of a sci-fi convention has to appease a famous sci-fi writer who has asked for a particular type of British candy:

“We need some British candy, folks! Anybody got any? All help will be appreciated.”

A wave of shrugs passed through the clumps of people, but after a few moments of silence, a blonde girl in a green tunic and blue body-paint approached them. “British,” she said shyly to Diefenbaker. “Like . . . does that include Scotland?”

Diefenbaker hastily changed a snicker into an encouraging smile. “Yes, Kathy. Indeed it does. Why?”

She twisted her yellow sash and shifted from one foot to the other in an effort of concentration.  “Well . . . like I met this guy today, you know, in the elevator, and he said he was from Scotland, but he wasn’t dressed up or anything. He was just in regular old jeans. I’d say he was a mundane. But he might like candy!”

“I’ll find him if I have to mind-meld the desk clerk!” cried Miles, hurrying away.

And you know a pop culture reference has come of age when a major politician flubs it. At a press conference on 1 March 2013 US President Barack Obama melded two different strains of science fiction when he said:

Most people agree that I’m presenting a fair deal. The fact that they don’t take it means that I should somehow do a “Jedi mind-meld” with these folks and convince them to do what’s right.

He, of course, meant Jedi mind trick, which is another thing altogether and from Star Wars, not Star Trek.

What is most curious about mind-meld, however, is how it became the standard term in fan discourse before the writers of the Star Trek universe had settled on the term. Mind-meld is not the favored term in the original series, yet it is the one that fans adopted. It was only at the end of the 1970s, with the first of the Star Trek movies, that mind meld became the dominant term in the universe’s canon. It may be that the book The Making of Star Trek had an influence on fans more than on the series’s writers, or it may be that the alliterative mind-meld is simply more pleasing to the ear than mind link or mind probe.

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Sources:

Burke, J. F. “The Censors.” Authentic Science Fiction, 41, 15 January 1954, 98–112 at 105. Archive.org.

Historical Dictionary of Science Fiction, 18 February 2021, s.v. mind-meld, n.; 17 November 2024, s.v. mindmeld, v., mindlink, n.

McCollum, Charlie. “A Series of Movies that Can Blow Your Mind.” Washington Star (Washington, DC), 21 November 1976, G-7/1. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

McCrumb, Sharyn. Bimbos of the Death Sun. Lake Geneva, Wisconsin: TSR, 1988, 19–21. Archive.org.

Meta Trek. “A Mind Meld by any Other Name | Star Trek: TOS.” YouTube, 2022.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, 1999, mind-meld, n.; 2006, mind-meld, v.

Whitfield, Stephen E. and Gene Roddenberry. The Making of Star Trek. New York: Ballantine, 1968, 227. Archive.org.

Photo credit: Desilu Productions/Paramount Television, 1967. Fair use of a single frame from a television episode to illustrate the topic under discussion.