If it is important to have a clear definition of chemicals, then it is also important to be clear and consistent in the terms we use to name chemicals in our curricula. Consider the difference between acetic acid, acetic acid, and vinegar. A student who begins to understand that vinegar is harmless may infer that glacial acetic acid must also be harmless because it is the same thing.

In preliminary work, we found that the names we give to chemicals affect our perceptions of their origin (natural, synthetic) and safety (safe/unsafe). For example, when asked to rate water and dihydrogen oxide as known or unknown, safe or unsafe, people who didn't know dihydrogen oxide generally thought it was unsafe, while those who said they didn't know dihydrogen oxide thought it was not as safe as water. Know what it is. Instead, everyone knows what water is and thinks it's safe or neutral. Similar conflicting results were found when undergraduates were asked to rate different names for aspirin, nicotine and alcohol. If common names are associated with widely reported health effects, the safety of the chemical is less clear. Where the chemical name is unfamiliar, the perception of the substance's origin is more likely to be synthetic and less likely to be considered safe.

If the names we give chemicals influence people's perceptions of their safety, then we have to be careful when using terms in the laboratory. It's well known that the word salt can cause some confusion between salt and acid-base reaction products, but what if the word salt also equates to safe because we can eat one type? What if using common names (many chemicals are still commonly used in university laboratories) creates a false sense of security? Further work is needed to investigate these findings in greater depth.

Where do our students fit into the picture? If we think of our students in chemist training as being very much at the interface between the public and the experts, then it is clear that they will be heavily influenced by the attitudes of both when they grow up as chemists. On the one hand, they will experience chemistry in an academic environment, conduct experiments, use laboratory chemicals, learn to assess risk and deepen their understanding of the principles underpinning the chemistry of the world. On the other hand, they will be returning to environments where the perception of chemistry and chemicals can be quite different. How can we help students reconcile these worldviews?