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Message:: [QUOTE="GDJMSP, post: 2398706, member: 112"]In the past we've had some good discussions regarding these words - verdigris, patina, bronze disease. Depending on who you talk to each of those words can be used to describe entirely different things, or the exact same thing. And each of them can have a negative or a positive connotation, again depending on who you talk to - and the context in which they are being used. We've got 3 people here that I know of who are chemists - Kentucky, desertgem, and BadThad. We may have more, but I know of those 3. They'll use terms like oxide, and chloride, sulfate, sulfide, and and and. And to them they know exactly what they are talking about and their differences or similarities, while we laymen often do not. To a lot of us, it's all just green stuff, that's the group I'm in - it's green stuff. Patina is a little different in that it is can be used, and accurately so, to describe many different colors, not just green. And sometimes, even when the patina is green, it's still different, or thought to be different anyway. But verdigris and bronze disease, to the best of my knowledge they're pretty much always green. But the one thing that all 3 of these, patina, verdigris, and bronze disease,  have in common is that they are, simply put, corrosion, or the result of corrosion. At least as I understand it. I mean when you come right down to it, even though we (coin collectors, numismatists) don't refer to it as such, toning is nothing more than corrosion. It is the effect of the elements on metal. And those elements can come into contact with coins in many different ways, direct contact in liquid form, the ground, the very air we breathe. There's just no way to avoid it, all metal comes into contact with the elements in one way or another. And corrosion is the result. But we don't always like to call it corrosion. Corrosion has too much of a negative connotation. So we'll use words like patina, or toning because they, well they just sound better. They can have or at least lend a "positive" aspect instead of a "negative" aspect to the things we care about, the things we like. In other words they are euphemisms. And that's why bronze disease and/or verdigris is sometimes referred to as patina. I mean verdigris just doesn't sound good, and bronze disease, well how could anything that is a "disease" possibly be good ? But when ancient collectors are talking about their coins and the verdigris that has formed on them over the centuries has become hard, a solid surface almost, they refer to it as patina. Why ? Well I think it's because it just sounds better. It's no different than the rest of us calling corrosion on our coins toning - that just sounds better. It makes us feel better about the things that we like, the things we care about. But when push comes to shove - it's all just corrosion. Patina, toning, verdigris, bronze disease - it's all just corrosion. The chemical compositions may be different, but it's all still just the same thing. It's no different than calling cleaning conservation - they're both the exact same thing, but one sounds better than the other. And we do that with all sorts of words, we choose to use words when describing our coins that make us feel better about them. And if the definition of that word doesn't really fit well then we just kind of change that defintion to suit our own purposes at the time. Over time and with continued use before ya know it one thing means something else because people are willing to accept things that make them feel better, things that change a negative to a positive.[/QUOTE]

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