When I use a word...

The recent discovery that koala bears have fingerprints that more closely resemble those of humans than chimpanzees' fingerprints do is said to support the hypothesis that fingerprints evolved as an aid to climbing. Whether or not that is so, fingerprints have been used for centuries as means of identification. Greek vases, for instance, bear examples as signatures, and in India a fingerprint used in this way by an illiterate person was known as tipsahi. But fingerprints were first systematically described by Johannes Evangelista Purkenje (sic) in his thesis, Commentatis de examine physiologico organi visus et systematis cutanei, published in Breslau in 1823. And they were really put on the map by the astronomer William Herschel (the Younger), who first devised a method for printing them in 1858, and by Francis Galton the geneticist, who in 1892 wrote a book, Fingerprints, about the differences in skin creases in different individuals.

The word dermatoglyphics was invented in 1926 by Harold Cummins and Charles Midlo and was used for the first time in a paper on what they called "epidermal ridge configurations" (Am J Phys Anthropol 1926;9:471-502), where they restricted its use to ridges and their arrangements, excluding flexion creases and other secondary folds. Its origin is simple: from µ (derma), the skin, and ü (glupho), I sculpt.

In everyday speech we may prefer to say "fingerprints," but "dermatoglyphics" is used much more often in publications, partly no doubt because it sounds more scientific, but also because it can be used to describe not only the prints themselves but also the study of them. Thus, although "fingerprint" and its derivatives were used in 3825 titles or abstracts of bioscience papers published between 1966 and 1997, in only 197 of those was dermatoglyphics meant, the other cases all being to do with fingerprinting as a molecular biological tool. In contrast, 1475 papers about proper fingerprints used the word dermatoglyphics.

Dermatoglyphics also leaves a distinctive fingerprint in the dictionary: it is the longest word in the English language (15 letters) that uses no letter twice.

Jeff Aronson, clinical pharmacologist, Oxford 

CiteULike    Complore    Connotea    Del.icio.us    Digg    Reddit    Technorati    What's this?