In defense of "unobtanium"

Look, I'm not gonna argue that James Cameron is a great screenwriter or anything, and the King of the World certainly doesn't need any help from the likes of me, but I feel compelled to defend him when it comes to that one word in the "Avatar" script that everyone seems to laugh at: unobtanium.

Vanity Fair is just the latest outlet to snark about Cameron's term for the mineral at the heart of his film's epic conflict. Their "advance copy" of Cameron's Oscar speech sums up the Internet community's opinion fairly well: "I named the magical rock-thing 'unobtanium' for God's sake. That was a typo. I had some Stanford guy come up with a special Latin name, but then I was like, F*** it."

The truth is that Cameron didn't come up with "unobtanium." It is a word that has been used by scientists for decades to describe an unknown or impossible-to-find material. (This article sums it up nicely.) Heck, "Avatar" isn't even the first movie to use the term -- that would be the simply awful 2003 disaster flick "The Core."

Anyone who took chemistry shouldn't be surprised that actual scientific names are sometimes very, very stupid. Don't you remember your Periodic Table of the Elements, and those weird elements down at the bottom? Let me refresh your memory:

With atomic numbers of 97 and 98, Berkelium and Californium are named for where they were first synthesized -- The University of California at Berkeley. One number higher, at 99, you'll find Einsteinium. No. 112 is Copernicium. And surely, if you've seen "Back to the Future," you've heard of Plutonium (94). Just before it on the table are other elements named for planets, Neptunium and Uranium. (Maybe Cameron would have been better off just calling it "Pandorium.")

My point is, there are plenty of things about "Avatar" you could criticize -- you don't need to focus on this one, ultimately immaterial word. But boy, I sure wish Cameron would rediscover the gift for memorable (in a good way) dialogue that he showed us in "Aliens" and "True Lies."