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by b1c1jones 1185 days ago
Organic doesn't necessarily imply living.
1 comments

It actually does: "Organic: relating to or derived from living matter"
Yes, /originally/ 'Organic' meant from living matter. However, when it was discovered that urea could be synthesised in the lab, we realised that there was no real distinction between 'living' molecules and 'dead' ones ...

Nowadays, 'organic' refers to chemicals with a majority (?) carbon content. It gets a little tricky for things like diamond and graphene (both materials) or for compounds that have a lot of heteroatoms.

Oddly enough, another nucleotide base (adenine) is exactly 50:50 C:N and has been proved to be synthesised from just HCN. So is it 'half'organic' :)

As a (former) organic chemist, this is spot-on. "Organic" doesn't really have a strict definition, but it's not so much "majority carbon" as it is presence of a C-H and/or C-C bond. I personally don't consider diamond and graphite organic, but some do. Carbon disulfide and phosgene (COCl2) usually aren't regarded as organic. And as you mentioned, stuff with carbon and lots of carbon atoms is a grey area (looking at you, azidoazide azide, but not looking at it too hard, it might not like that).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organic_compound

Organic compound simply means that there are carbon-hydrogen bonds or carbon-carbon bonds in a compound.

The view that this requires "life" was a legitimate theory back in 1800s and was disproved in the late 1820s. (See the wiki link for more details)

This is the difference between standard usage and jargon.

Chemists consider any covalent compound involving carbon that isn't only carbon to be "organic".

Normal usage is what you wrote.

Alternative but widespread usage is "agricultural products made without synthesized fertilizers and pesticides".

Oh, and business jargon uses organic to mean "natural market growth or internally developed capabilities", as opposed to buying the growth or capability.

And in military usage, organic means "a permanently assigned assisting unit", so that routine vehicle maintenance, for example, is handled by people who travel with the vehicle.

I've taken to using "organic-branded" for the agricultural products, since "organic" is essentially an FDA brand, with regulations for usage of the branding. Its also my personal rebellion against "organic" having a functional meaning of "magicalhealthygoodness" in some circles.
It's like astronomer talking about metals. By which they mean everything that's not hydrogen or helium.
> like astronomer talking about metals

This is particular to stellar astrophysics. Astronomers studying asteroids maintain the conventional definition.

To their credit, I remember something about basically every element ionizes to some extent in space, thus exhibiting the "sea of electrons" behavior characteristic of metals.