The Golden Beetle

Golden beetle
The material adjective of gold is golden. The older guilder is sometimes also heard. If something is covered with a layer of gold or gold paint, it is called gilding. The word gold has gained its place in language as “valuable” and / or “durable”, or is otherwise used figuratively, for example:

A golden wedding stands for a 50-year anniversary of marriage.
A golden jubilee stands for a 50th anniversary
The gold medal symbolizes the first place
The gold record, for popular music albums
The Golden Age
The golden section
The Golden Fleece

The currency guilder, originally a gold coin.

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Cone gold, cat gold, gold micaceous gold
The word ’tinsel’ means something that one wants to pass off as gold or something of value, but in fact it is not. An example of this is the mineral pyrite (cf. English: fool’s gold, German: narrengold), which was loved by pseudoal chemists and quacks because of its golden appearance. Cat gold is also fake gold – cats are known to be fake – only this refers to yellow mica or, regionally, to yellow resin. Yellow mica is also known as gold mica.

The term gold in biological names
The word gold is also used in biology to give animals and plants a name. The name ‘golden’ can refer to a yellow colour as well as to a golden sheen, often the Latin aurata is used. Examples are the rain of gold (Laburnum anagyroides) and the golden poison dart frog (Dendrobates auratus), because of their yellow colours, and the golden beetle (Cetonia aurata), because of its metallic sheen.

Silver was already used for decorations and as a means of payment before the beginning of our era. Excavations show that as early as 4000-3500 B.C. silver was separated from lead on islands in the Aegean Sea and Anatolia. Often silver was associated with the moon, the sea and various gods. In alchemy the symbol of a crescent moon was used for silver and alchemists called it Luna. The metal mercury was thought to be a kind of silver. In some languages this is still apparent from the name that mercury has such as quicksilver in English or mercury (with the meaning living silver) in somewhat older Dutch. Much later it turned out to be two completely different elements.

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The name silver leads to the Old High German silbar of the Germanic root *seluƀra-. It is suspected that this is a loan word that originates from Asia Minor or even further away. In Latin silver is called argentum, to which silver owes the symbol Ag.

Applications of gold and silver
Until well into the 20th century, silver and gold coins were the most important means of payment for mankind. There are at least fourteen languages in which the word silver also means money. A well-known example is the French argent. Nowadays we only see the use of silver in commemorative coins and other collector’s coins and tokens.

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Silver is a widely used material in applied art for the manufacture of reliefs, portrait busts, reliquaries, baptismal shells and other liturgical tableware, candlesticks, tobacco and snuff boxes, coffee pots, table silver and other ornaments and utensils.
Sterling silver (alloy with a very high silver content) is widely used by goldsmiths in the manufacture of jewellery. Silver bracelets, necklaces and earrings are known from antiquity. In the 18th century, silver shoe buckles were in vogue. A charm bracelet is almost always made of silver.
Silver is also used to silver objects made of inferior metals.
Silver leaf, consisting of thin slices of silver, is used for decoration, for example in painting (icons) or in the manufacture of gold leather. A special application of silver leaf is pig (or varakh), the popular use in India to decorate cakes with very thin layers of pure silver.
Silver is suitable for mirrors of very high quality because it has good light-reflecting properties. But usually aluminium is used because it is much cheaper.

The good electrical conductivity of silver makes it a very suitable material in electrical and electronic products. In circuits, silver (or silver alloys) is used to connect components. For longer connections, silver is too expensive.
As a catalyst, silver is used in industry for the production of formaldehyde and ethylene oxide, for example.
In dentistry, silver is used in an alloy containing mercury (amalgam).
Because of its disinfecting properties, silver is nowadays also used to purify or keep clean drinking water. Especially for small amounts of water (up to 100 litres), silver (as silver nitrate) is easier to dose and apply than chlorine. Colloidal silver used to be used as an antibiotic in medicine.