I learned a couple of new words from this fascinating “interactive” NY Times article by Abraham Z. Cooper, a pulmonary and critical care physician and associate professor of medicine (archived versions don’t seem to work, because of the interactivity, but hopefully you can read the text at Facebook):
In 2021, researchers described what they saw when they had examined skin-biopsy samples that included tattoos: The ink particles had traveled deeper than anticipated, through interstitial spaces into the tissue underneath the skin, or the fascia. “That wasn’t supposed to happen,” Neil Theise, a professor of pathology at New York University and a senior author of the paper reporting the results, told me.
The existence of an apparent conduit between skin and the fascia beneath it — two tissue layers not known to connect with each other in this way — broke accepted anatomic boundaries. The researchers also found that the same was true for other previously unknown microscopic connections between organs in the abdomen.
That interstitial spaces exist in and under the skin and between and around the body’s organs had been observed going back more than a century, but they were assumed to exist in isolation from one another, like a patchwork quilt.
Theise and his colleagues published their first observations of these spaces in 2018. Their findings in the 2021 tattoo-ink study implied that the body’s interstitial spaces were parts of a vast interconnected whole — what scientists now call the interstitium. “This is clearly a third bodily system for the circulation of fluids,” in addition to the cardiovascular and lymphatic systems, says Rebecca Wells, a professor of medicine at the University of Pennsylvania and a senior author of the study. The human body suddenly looked less like a patchwork quilt and more like a knitted blanket.
The OED (in a 1900 entry) has interstitium as a synonym of interstice, but in 1993 they added a sense “Anatomy and Zoology. That part of a given region of the body which lies between the principal cells, tissues, etc. of that region” (first citation from 1949). Later in the Times article, we get:
Plants seem to possess their own version of an interstitium, too. It’s called the apoplast, a type of interstitial space that transports water and nutrients outside cell membranes. These and other examples suggest that fluid moving through interstitial spaces might have represented the first circulatory systems to develop in the earliest forms of complex multicellular plant and animal life, hundreds of millions of years ago.
The word apoplast is new enough that it isn’t in the OED; per the Wikipedia article it was coined as far back as 1930, but that was in German, and who knows when it entered English? That’s why we need an OED entry. (Thanks, Bonnie!)
Why do they need to separate interstitium from interstice? There’s hardly semantic space between them.
The interstitial system is ordered so that vertical passages have odd mumbers and horizontal passages even numbers.
Why do they need to separate interstitium from interstice? There’s hardly semantic space between them.
Because they’re two different words. There’s no semantic space at all; the definitions read:
1. Of space: = interstice n. 1.
2. Of time: = interstice n. 2.
I do understand why they need separate entries in the dictionary when both words (or forms of the word*) are used. The question I rhetorically aimed for was rather “Why did somebody feel the need to take interstitium into their professional English when interstice was available with the same meaning?”
* Are they separate words or available variant forms when they share derived forms like interstitial?
From a 1738 book about church history by Edward Ambrose Burgis: “the first ordination they may receive all the lesser orders except that of acolyte, which may be conferred upon them three months after, and the like interstitium of three months must be observed betwixt that of acolyte and sub-deacon, sub-deacon and deacon, deacon and priest” etc. This supposedly from a letter of A.D. 494 of Pope Gelasius to certain bishops in or near Calabria and Sicily advising them “to relax something of the rigor of ecclesiastical discipline in regard of interstitiums in ordinations.” (Note the non-Latinate plural.)
Probably they didn’t know interstice. I didn’t.
Concerning apoplast, it gets weirder: the very short German Wikipedia article implies that before it was called that in English, it was called AFS = apparent free space, and cites:
Probably they didn’t know interstice. I didn’t.
I’ll second that. And interstitium is a very natural sounding noun form of interstitial to me. In fact I thought I had heard the word before I read the dates it was coined.
IIRC I learned about apoplast in high school biology in the late 1990’s, but related to plants. I don’t remember it extended to other forms of life. Or maybe I just forgot about it.
Even if interstice were a common word, interstitium sounds natural to me, along with other thin things like (< Greek) endometrium and peritoneum, and reticulum.
The edit window closed just as I remembered a recent article/paper about it, but I’ll have to find it first.
@Trond: Why do they need to separate interstitium from interstice? There’s hardly semantic space between them.
As the OP points out, the interstitium is a structure comprised of lots of interstices:
I guess you could say it’s a difference of scale.
building on what RfP said: the interstitium is the system of interstices, considered as (here i’m extrapolating a little from the source article, i think) something parallel to the lymphatic system or skin, and similar to them in scale, distinctness, and importance. i don’t think there are other organs or systems where the overall name and the name of the consituent units are so similar, but it makes sense to me, since part of why the interstitium hasn’t been recognized before is that it doesn’t have constituents that are clearly separable structures, like lymph nodes and ducts, or arteries, veins, and capillaries.
Now that we have identified the semantic space between interstitium and interstice, what do we call it?
if you mind it, it’s a gap. if you don’t, it isn’t?
Thread win goes to rozele
@RfP, rozele, & all: Thanks. That does make sense. But since the few historical examples seem to show no clear distinction, and a distinction would seem difficult to uphold anyway, my next question is why they chose to introduce one rather than coin a new term like, e.g., interstitial system.
The NYT article was fascinating.
I wondered, though–without relevant education–why it should be surprising that there was some way, in addition to blood and lymph circulation, for substances to move in the body. It mentioned tattoo ink going where not expected. Previous reports, iiuc, told of heavy metals in some hair dyes making their way into the nervous system and brain. Totally by blood and lymph? I don’t know.
“Insterstitium” is defined in the excerpt as a collection or system of interstitial spaces. To me, an interstice implies a single gap, space, or chamber, not a network of barely-connected spaces.
Same here. The terminology makes intuitive sense to me.
Yeah, the terminology works for me too. However, that may be a result of interstice feeling to me like a relatively ordinary, albeit uncommon, word in its physical (but maybe not temporal) sense. The preexisting senses of interstitium are much less “normal” parts of my vocabulary. So interstitium seems like a reasonable word for a technical sense elaborated from interstice.
Because they’re marketing it as an “organ” as opposed to a “system”. Like: “first new organ discovered in centuries”.
If you ever get any of the dye into your mouth, nose, or eyes… Conversely, it’s not likely to diffuse through the epidermis, which it would need to do to reach the interstitium in the first place. (It’s certainly not supposed to.)
Huh, I didn’t even know “interstice” existed in the singular — I’d only heard of interstices, plural. They do usually come in crowds, as in a crystal lattice or spongy structure.
I also thought “interstices” was pronounced with “‑eez” — and that pronunciation is usual on Youglish — but now I wonder if that’s a hypercorrection, as with “process-eez” or “bias-eez”? I guess it must be, since the 1900 OED made no note on the plural pronunciation, which implies it was regular (though they note that it was spelled “intersticies” in one quotation from 1646), and to this day the majority of dictionaries include “interstice” with no note on the plural.
Aha, Merriam-Webster’s Third Unabridged (1961) listed “interstic-eez” with the danger symbol ÷ that marked pronunciations that “many regard as unacceptable”. But in the 1963 Collegiate, and every edition since, they’ve simply given both ‑eez and ‑iz pronunciations with no danger symbol. Same for AHD: both pronunciations for the plural in every edition, no usage note.
(“Process-eez” at Language Hat: 2007 and several times since.)
LPD has the plural ɪz əz .
CEPD has -ɪz -iːz .
Btw, Geoff Lindsay’s YT channel has an interview with J C Wells.
i seem to have “interstices” with /-i:z/, “biases” with /-ɪz/ or /-ɛz/, and “processes” with a lot of incoherence leaning towards /-ɪz/. [n=1]
Thanks, ulr!
Google Books thinks it knows: apparently by the 1950s-1960s. Their metadata is mostly garbage as usual, but some of the 1960s hits are real. So it’s not missing from the OED because it’s too new, it’s missing because they haven’t covered plant physiology thoroughly. It *could* have been in Burchfield’s 1972 A-G Supplement, if he’d asked specialists in the subject.
In fact apoplast *is* in Burchfield’s 1986 Se-Z Supplement — in a quotation illustrating symplast, which was coined together with it by the same German author: “the plant body is..composed of two major compartments, for which the terms apoplast and symplast are convenient (Münch, 1930)”. It looks like Burchfield did ask a specialist in the subject, but too late for the earlier part of the alphabet, and they must not have left any notes saying “hey, get this alphabetically earlier word in next time you have a chance”, even though (according to ngrams) apoplast is actually more common than symplast.
ulr, Thanks for the Wells interview! From which I learn of two books he wrote, apparently derived from the blog: Sounds Interesting: Observations on English and General Phonetics, and Sounds Fascinating: Further Observations on English Phonetics and Phonology. They both sou— oh, never mind.
An Azimov character mentions some offstage doggerel which rhymed “interstices” with “worse disease”.
From the comments there:
“What a lovely interview. It was following a random link to a post on John Wells’s Phonetic Blog as a teen 20 years ago that triggered my passion for linguistics.”
“Me too! (In my case it was the post on the RULER/RULER split.)”
Also, this is how I discover the channel Pronunciation Studio. I had noticed the alveolar [θ] in narrowly defined RP, but not consciously!
FTW.
There are previews on GBooks. They really look like good books.
I don’t remember ever hearing any pronunciation of “interstices” but the one that rhymes with “worse disease”, and I wouldn’t have been able to tell you whether there was a singular. If someone had told me to guess the singular, I might have come up with something ending in x.
(However, I don’t pronounce “biases” or “processes” with /-i:z/,)
“interstix” could be a late-90s snack food*, or perhaps a light rail line that leads to the underworld.
.
* perhaps like pocky, but savory and notched for lincoln-logs-style tower-building?
“An obol for the interstix…”
Hix Not Interstix Pix
“interstices” but the one that rhymes with “worse disease”
Not a pronunciation I would have guessed; I first encountered the word in this thread and mentally pronounced it as rhyming with vices.
What is the rule here?
IntERpret/preter/preting
InterSTELlar
INterplay
INterbreed / InterBREED
InterBREEding / INterbreeding
InterSPERSE
INterstate
Note intERminable/interment = in+… not inter+….
You could say something like “if what comes after inter is a recognisable word, then the stress is on the word or on the first syllable” and maybe when what comes after inter is not a recognisable word, it attracts the stress if its stressed syllable has a long vowel, otherwise you have IntER….
CEPD has the following rule:
Exceptions exist
The motto of English pronunciation.
Other exceptions are “interpolate” and “interrogate”. For the gallicism “interpellate”, the OED gives /ɪnˈtəːpɪleɪt/ before /ɪntəˈpɛleɪt/; M-W reverses the order (and rhoticizes, of course).
And “intercalate” (back to solid-state physics), at least in some pronunciations.
I had not realized that “extrapolate” comes from “interpolate”, and “interpolate” is related to “polish”.
The OED needs to fix its definition of “interpolate” in math. It’s not just “To insert an intermediate term or terms in a series (see interpolation n. 3b). With the series, or now usually the term, as object. Also absol. or intransitive, to use or perform interpolation. Also figurative.”