Saponification

Big word.  Big story.

As the legend goes, a gazillion years ago, on a mountain near Rome, the fat of sacrificed animals mixed with the ashes from the sacrificial fires.  Presto!  – they had soap! 

The legend says over the course of years, as these small particles of soap were washed down the hill, they found their way into local streams. 

At the same time, a local woman started up a laundry in the area.  The clothes she laundered were somehow always cleaner and smelled much nicer than any others known to the Romans.  The woman was known far and wide as demi-laundress and was soon being called upon by all the great thinkers of the day. 

In time, a few of these smart guys got together and figured out the cleaning factor was somehow related to some small, squishy balls of off-white stuff, found in the streams and rivulets of the area.  It was only a matter of time before they figured out the rest.  

The name of the mountain was Sapo.  And so these great thinkers, these philosophers and mathematicians and orators, got together and decided to call the stuff, what else, Sapo.  (That’s soap to you and me.) 

The woman was at once exposed as a fraud and banished to the colonies.  There, she ran a successful dry cleaning business until her untimely death from a condition caused, some say, by the harsh chemicals.

Today the process of taking the ingredients of soap (fats or oils, water and lye), and combining them into soap, is called saponification.  A big word for what is most likely not a true story. 

In reality, the entomology of the word sapo, which means ‘fat’ or ‘tallow,’ appears to be around 2200 years old, and comes from Eastern Europe.   Then, when the Romans came in several decades later to redecorate that part of the world, the legend tells us some thinkers and orators also tagged along.