CONTINUED
MEPHITIC: What is that smell?
by Karen Murdock
“Adjective literary” presumably means that, in the opinion of the O.L.D. editors, nobody uses this adjective nowadays unless they want to sound high-falutin’. The Oxford English Dictionary sniffs at the bad smell and says the word is “now archaic and literary.”
Other dictionaries are less prescriptive. Merriam-Webster.com even gives some recent examples from magazines and newspapers, to prove that the word is still in use. Besides, even if it is “archaic and literary” in 2025, since “The Terror of Blue John Gap” was written in 1910 Doyle cannot be accused of literary pretentiousness when he used this adjective.
All sources say mephitic means “bad smelling.” Doyle wanted the reader to know this meant REALLY bad smelling—noxious, pestilential, possibly poisonous.
The fact that Doyle capitalized the adjective means he was aware of its derivation. The Latin word “mephitis” means noxious vapor. Mephitis was the Roman goddess of foul-smelling gases from volcanoes and swampy areas. (She probably was not invited to many of your higher-class god-and-goddess cocktail parties.) The bad-smelling gas emitted from volcanoes is sulfur dioxide [SO2]. Swamp gas is hydrogen sulfide [H2S], which has a distinct rotten egg smell.
Speaking of stinky things, skunks are in the family Mephitidae. The common North American striped skunk (Mephitis mephitis) pays double homage to the goddess of terrible smells.
Although it was written 87 years before he was born, it is certainly possible that Doyle was aware of the 1772 M.D. dissertation of Daniel Rutherford at the University of Edinburgh, “Dissertatio Inauguralis de ere fix, at mephitic” (Inaugural dissertation on the air [called] fixed or mephitic).
Rutherford (1749-1819) was a Scottish physician, chemist and botanist who served as professor of medicine and botany at the University of Edinburgh and physician at Edinburgh Royal Infirmary. He was famous for the isolation of nitrogen gas in 1772. In 1783 he was a joint founder of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. The Daniel Rutherford Building now stands on the campus of the University.
Doyle studied medicine at the University between 1876 and 1881, when the name of the great man must still have been resounding through its corridors.
WHO IS KAREN?
Karen Murdock is a word-besotted scholar and an expert on figures of speech in the Sherlock Holmes stories (of which she has identified several thousand). She is a member of The Adventuresses of Sherlock Holmes (“May Blunder”), a prolific poster on The Hounds of the Internet, and an active Norwegian Explorer of Minnesota. She is a retired geography teacher and lives one block from the lovely gorge of the Mississippi River in Minneapolis.