Blue whale skeleton at New Bedford museum still oozing oil

If we woke up one day to discover that the skeleton was mercilessly destroyed, I think we already have our suspect :p

All jokes aside, this got me curious to look for the definition of "oil", a word used to describe stuff extracted from plants, rocks and, apparently, animals too.

It turns out that for a liquid to be classified as oil, according to Merriam Webster, it needs to be "flammable", "not dissolve in water" and "greasy".

What's greasy, you ask? Well, it's smeared in... "oily matter".

"Oil" used to mean olive oil and nothing else.

Its usage gradually expanded to include other vegetable fats, liquid animal fats such as whale oil, and finally mineral oil when it was discovered.

People back then weren't particularly interested in the chemical compositions of the different oils, only that they felt similar and served similar purposes.

Meanwhile, animal fats that are solid at room temperature, such as butter and lard, were never really called "oil" despite being much closer to other edible fats than anything we dug up from a desert.