Monday, April 14, 2014

IUPAC Is A Headache

It's a bad sign when even your organic textbook gives up on trying to explain the reasoning behind some of IUPAC's nomenclature decisions and just says: "To keep things interesting, however, IUPAC recognizes eight exceptions for which a -yl ending rather than an -oyl ending is used..."

I really can't decide if IUPAC has its mysterious reasons for deciding how we should name chemical compounds, or if it's just a bunch of nutty Ph.D chemists in a room somewhere laughing maniacally as they assign arbitrary rules that we must all treat as law.

In Pace Christi,

Elyse

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