Today glue is something that comes in tubes or bottles or something you lick to seal an envelope.

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Kids have lots of experience with glue but once we’ve grown to adulthood our exposure is more limited, except when we have to fix something around the house.

Certainly glue is a useful substance and fittingly the word has been around a very long time and has always referred to something sticky.

Interestingly though, the uses and shades of meaning change over time and from application to application.

Back in Indo-European the word gloi or gli meant “stick.” This word evolved and by the time it shows up in Latin it appears as gluten.

The word gluten is likely a word you recognize as a component in wheat flour; gluten is the gummy part that makes bread dough behave a little bit like glue. Gluten is what  makes a loaf of bread stick together.

Back in Latin gluten didn’t have quite this narrow a meaning and was used not only for glue itself, but other methods of sticking things together; solder and connecting ties or bands are mentioned in one source.

Although glue is important in our lives it isn’t necessarily easy to imagine how the Indo-Europeans used glue.

There’s a hint in the first documented use of the word glue in English back in 1380as reported by The Oxford English Dictionary.

A little cryptically the OED defines that first use as meaning “bird lime.”

What is bird lime? you might ask yourself.

One ancient technique of catching your groceries was to smear the branch of a tree with glue so that when a bird landed it couldn’t take off again. It was stuck there until you came along and grabbed it and took it home for supper.

That’s one of the more ancient uses of glue.

A more modern word arose in 1971 among nuclear physicists.

Imagine yourself working in a world of electrons, protons and neutrons. Those protons and neutrons are particularly securely stuck together.

What theoretical stuff might there be that could do such a good job at sticking them together.

Let’s see, electrons, protons, neutrons … ah, how about gluons?