A dirty word?

Even as a non-chemist, I’ve always been struck by how bad ‘chemicals’ are supposed to be for us, whether they maliciously crop up in food, farming, under the sink or in the air. Of course, since joining the Royal Society of Chemistry at the beginning of the year, I’ve rapidly learned that it’s not quite that simple.

Watching TV recently I was struck by two adverts, in the same commercial break, both from big German companies. One proudly announced ‘in our homes, there are no chemicals’, the other ‘we don’t just make chemicals, we create chemistry’.

So what's in a word? Why are associations with the word 'chemical' so different to those for 'chemistry', and is there anything we can do about it?