The podictionary word for today is galvanized: If you go to the hardware store you can buy big rough looking bolts and things that are sort of a grey color and are said to be galvanized. When a person is galvanized they are not encased in metal, but prepared or stimulated for action. This word has split in at least three directions and it’s all the fault of another old Italian who was playing with electricity more than 200 years ago.

Knowing that steel and iron objects are galvanized to prevent them from rusting, I always had assumed that when someone was galvanized they were sort of prepared and so protected when they went into a challenging situation. Because of my background as an electrical engineer I was also aware that things like mag wheels get pitted and corroded due to something called galvanic corrosion. In fact, when oil companies want to prevent their off shore oil drilling rigs to get rusty in the salt water of the sea, they don’t galvanize them, instead they sometimes strap big aluminum chunks to the steel structures so that the galvanic corrosion works for them and eats away at the aluminum instead of rusting the steel.

Galvanic corrosion involves a current running through salt water based on the differing electrical properties of dissimilar metals. All this led me to think that those galvanized bolts in the hardware store must have been put in some bath of chemicals and charged electrically somehow. But in all these assumptions I was wrong wrong wrong. Back in the late 1700s there was a guy called Luigi Galvani who surprised himself and everyone else when he was trying dissecting a frog and turned to another task when a colleague came over and picked up the scalpel and touched a nerve in the severed legs of the frog. Low and behold the legs started kicking.

Wondering why this might have happened he made note of the fact that on the same table he had some electrical equipment and perhaps a charge had gotten onto the scalpel. Luigi then undertook various experiments such as pinning frogs’ legs to an iron latticework in his garden to see if they would kick during thunderstorms. They did, but they seemed to kick even when he did this and the weather was clear. He came up with a theory that the brain generates electricity that flows down and shocks the muscles. It is from this theory that when we now say someone becomes galvanized. It isn’t—as I assumed—that they have some sort of protective coating, it’s that they are shocked into action.

Yesterday I talked about the word battery and Alessandro Volta. Actually Volta tried to reproduce Galvani’s experiments and found that sometimes they worked, and sometimes they didn’t. Pinning the frog’s legs to the iron grate using brass pins as Galvani had done worked fine, but pinning them with iron pins didn’t work at all. It was this fact that suggested to Volta the train of thought about differing metals and led to his invention of the battery.

Although we call this a galvanic effect, old Galvani actually didn’t have any idea the electricity had to do with differing metals. To add to the confusion, those galvanized bolts at the hardware store are hot dipped in zinc, not charged in any way. What’s an armchair etymologist to do?