Monday, April 16, 2018

Elements song by Tom Lehrer, updated

(Also posted on Facebook)

I've been working on memorizing all the chemical elements (long story) and I've always liked Tom Lehrer's classic song. It was written in 1959, though, so it doesn't include the elements discovered and named since then. There are several updated versions online that add an extra verse, but I didn't see one that rhymed! That's a major drawback in a memorization song. So I made my own update. Probably someone, somewhere, has made a rhyming one too, but I think my version works pretty well.

Here are Lehrer's original six verses, an update of his final two lines, then a new verse and new closing lines. If you're not familiar with the song, it goes to the "Modern Major-General" tune from Pirates of Penzance. (And here's a video with Lehrer singing a slightly modified version.)

There's antimony, arsenic, aluminum, selenium,
And hydrogen and oxygen and nitrogen and rhenium,
And nickel, neodymium, neptunium, germanium,
And iron, americium, ruthenium, uranium,

Europium, zirconium, lutetium, vanadium,
And lanthanum and osmium and astatine and radium,
And gold, protactinium and indium and gallium,
And iodine and thorium and thulium and thallium.

There's yttrium, ytterbium, actinium, rubidium,
And boron, gadolinium, niobium, iridium,
There's strontium and silicon and silver and samarium,
And bismuth, bromine, lithium, beryllium, and barium.

There's holmium and helium and hafnium and erbium,
And phosphorus and francium and fluorine and terbium,
And manganese and mercury, molybdenum, magnesium,
Dysprosium and scandium and cerium and cesium.

And lead, praseodymium and platinum, plutonium,
Palladium, promethium, potassium, polonium,
And tantalum, technetium, titanium, tellurium,
And cadmium and calcium and chromium and curium.

There's sulfur, californium and fermium, berkelium,
And also mendelevium, einsteinium, nobelium,
And argon, krypton, neon, radon, xenon, zinc and rhodium,
And chlorine, carbon, cobalt, copper, tungsten, tin and sodium.

These WERE the only ones of which the news had come to Harvard,
But we have to mention sixteen more that later were discovered.

There's tennessine, oganesson, meitnerium, moscovium,
And dubnium, darmstadtium, nihonium, flerovium,
[Deep breath and get ready to pack in those extra syllables]Copernicium, roentgenium, rutherfordium, livermorium,
[Now you can relax]And hassium, lawrencium, seaborgium and bohrium.

The seventh row is finished in the periodic table,
Further elements will be manmade and terribly unstable.


1 comment:

Lisa said...

That last line is pure genius.