When I was in high school, I liked to call it dihydrogen oxide. I never knew if that was correct.
The Wikipedia entry on dihydrogen monoxide says, “Water has a regular scientific or systematic name of hydrogen oxide, as well as an alkali name of hydrogen hydroxide and several acid names such as hydroxic acid, hydroxylic acid, and hydroxilic acid.” Earlier in the entry it points out that dihydrogen monoxide isn’t correct nomenclature.
I’m no chemist, but I believe this is one correct form. It stems from the observation that water can be a product of the combination of ions from an acid and a base, i.e. H (hydrogen) and OH (hydroxide).
I was totally geeked out when I found out that when you combine hydrochloric acid (HCl) and lye (NaOH), you get water (HOH or H[sub]2[/sub]0) and table salt (NaCl).
But yeah, going back to the OP, I hope the radio station gets their asses handed to them on a plastic tray garnished with punitive damages, followed by the firing and crimilan charged levied against the DJs, the producer, and the station owners. Unfortunately, the most that’ll happen is that they’ll settle out of court, the family of the deceased won’t be able to talk about it, the dead mom will once again be the butt of radio DJ jokes once the obligatory 3 weeks have passed… and the kids will still have lost their mother. 
I’m a chemical engineer, working as a chemist, and I’d say that anybody using “dihydrogen monoxide” doesn’t know what they’re talking about. Or is trying to make a joke that is much less clever than they think it is.
When chemists talk about water, we use the term “water”.
I’ve seen – once – it referred to as “hydrogen hydroxide” in a text discussing acid-base chemistry. That everywhere else referred to water as “water”.
When I was getting my MBA, my marketing prof. tried to be all clever and look smart by instead using the term “dihydrogen dioxide”. That’d probably be hydrogen peroxide; unfortunately he declined my offer to bring him in a glass of it to drink.
Also: water essentially behaves as a poison to the human body if its in sufficient quantity. IIRC, it can cause the victim to behave as though drunk, so water intoxication would seem to be a pretty good description of what killed her. (along with the stupid, of course)
Okay, let me first say that this woman’s death is indeed tragic and sad.
Having said that, it disturbs me that someone is willing to put themselves through considerable discomfort (and ultimately death) for a stupid piece of plastic and microchips. As stupid as the radio station is for having such a contest, as adults you’re responsible for your well-being and dignity. Personally, at the point it gets to be uncomfortable and/or my bladder gets full, I go home and let someone else have the glory of winning a Wii.
This is not dissimilar to those contests where people have to touch a truck to win it. Someone always gets heatstroke or dehydrated in those things. And for what? Something that can’t restore your health after you’ve damaged it.
I was just gonna say that, Hippy Hollow. (Really, I was, honest!)
I’m curious as to where this was happening. The last person to see Strange alive was a co-worker, so did she go back to work after the competition? How long did it last? Did anyone else have ill effects?
Wouldn’t she have thrown some of it up?
There’s no need to distinguish between them, because HO is not a stable substance.
What exactly are you thinking is a “matter of no small importance in this day and age”?
Are you perhaps thinking of H[sub]2[/sub]O[sub]2[/sub] (hydrogen peroxide)?
In any event, I have a degree in chemical engineering, and taught chemistry for five years, and never referred to H[sub]2[/sub]O as anything but “water.”
The proper systematic name for water would probably be “hydrogen oxide,” analogous to H[sub]2[/sub]S (hydrogen sulfide).
Well in my experience with water intoxication from treating marathoners in the ER it plays like this. With rapid ingestion of plain water, rapid depletion of sodium, or both you create a mismatch of particles in solution between the fluid in the blood and the fluid inside your cells. Water will move from the area of low sodium concentration (the blood) into the area or normal concentration (your cells, that’s why it has to be a rapid change). for our purpose we’re concerned about the swelling of the brain cells, which will cause altered mental status, respiratory depression, brain stem herniation and death in that order. So no, you’re not going to throw up the water, and yes it’s possible to win the contest, go to work and then begin to show signs of cerebral edema, which would be hard to recognize if you didn’t know the history. A few saltines or peanuts might have saved her life
She probably had friends who went for ultrasounds or went for one herself. For an ultrasound, you’re made to drink a bunch of water and not allowed to go to the bathroom. So a normal person would figure that it wasn’t unsafe since doctors make you do it.
In fact, I had to google the procedure for getting an ultrasound and then google water poisoning to find out how one can be safe and the other not. It’s a matter of not all that many more ounces. You drink 1 litre of water for an ultrasound, but can get in trouble on as little as 1.8 litres.
So I think people blaming the woman are being awful unfair. I imagine she would have thought that a radio station wouldn’t get people to do something that might actually kill them. Make them sick, maybe. Make them look stupid, maybe. But not kill them.
For those who did not understand that DHMO link, here’s the appropriate wikipedia link
“She said to one of our supervisors that she was on her way home and her head was hurting her real bad,” said Laura Rios, one of Strange’s co-workers at Radiological Associates of Sacramento. “She was crying and that was the last that anyone had heard from her.
What is even more tragic: she worked in a medical office, but nobody knew to help her, even though she apparently told co-workers what was going on.
My take on the article was that she phoned work and spoke to a supervisor to say she wasn’t coming in because she wasn’t feeling well.
As AuntiPam said, most people know that dehydaration is bad, but most people don’t know that too much water is dangerous too. If I took an informal poll of my friends and co-workers, I would expect the ones who know about water intoxiation would be athletes who do endurance training, like marathon runners who deplete their sodium levels. My sister (an athlete) knows, but my fiancee (also very athletic, trians about as much as my sister) did not, which actually surprised me.
Anyone who would sponsor a contest, and anyone who would enter a contest, where you couldn’t pee is crazy. That is one of the worst things you can do to your body.
I remember reading a newsstory years ago about a woman who fasted regularly and drank gallons of water a day to “get the toxins out.” She died of overhydration.
Aren’t there occasional blurbs in the news Over There talking about the need to drink water if you’re having X, and that it should not be low-sodium water? We get them Over Here because of occasional teenager deaths during raves.
Oh.
Wait.
Over There the current big government believes that they can keep teenagers from having sex by wishing real, real hard. Forget I asked…
Nothing, that was just a joke. I know precisely zip about HO.
Even if you never need to refer to HO or, in this case, HS, isn’t it better to in principle have the systematic name match the formula?
Jeebus, I was just reading at the Miami Herald website:
It seems to me that the contest is more BBQ Pit thread material.
If I, or any other chemist-type, need to refer to “HO”, I do so by calling it a “hydroxide ion”.
OH[sup]-[/sup] isn’t a chemical; it’s part of a chemical. Offhand, I can’t think of a means for it to exist independently of an ionic system. HS[sup]-[/sup] would be, I suppose, a “hydrogen sulfide ion”.
Am I incorrect in thinking that failure to urinate is not an issue here? Once the water is processed into urine, it is no longer causing the imbalance. Once you drink 1.8L of water(or whatever your personal amount it), urinating won’t fix it.
I don’t think the lack of urination matters. Marathon runners are obviously sweating out much of what water they take in, along with the salt in their bodies. The water lowers the sodium concentration of the plasma, the osmosis process starts to happen, cells begin to burst, and hyponatremia (where your electrolytes are far too low) causes you to die.
Sodium isn’t the only electrolyte that gets messed up with drinking such huge amounts of water and not replenishing your electrolytes, but it’s the fastest killer. There’s a reason that Gatorade has sodium in it.