ion age

never thought i'd be able to utter the phrase "polyatomic ion" and have any clues as to what it meant but i do! i want to share the love!... an ion is an atom that has lost or gained electrons and therefore has a positive or negative charge.. atoms aren't allowed to be positive or negative so they have to bond with other atom dudes that are also naughtily charged (other ions) so that their combining actually results in a net charge of zero.. when they hook up to make zero they're called a compound.. when only two are rockin around together (how vanilla sex) they're called a binary ionic compound.. any more than two and it's just called a compound that includes a "group sex" or polyatomic ion.. i have to memorise like a whole table of these fuckers!!! AND THEN i have to remember what the neg or pos charges of each one are.. here's a few so that i may bask in your inevitable pity.. H2PO4 = dihydrogen phosphate.. charge of +1.. cry for me.. to make matters even GROUSER they ofcourse must party down with other things to make the compounds that have zero charge eg Lithium (or "Li".. friend of pi-bolar nutters worldwide).. here's how that looks.. LiH2PO4.. that's lithium dihydrogen phosphate kids.. net charge = squat... aneurism's in mara's head from looking at WAAAAAAAAAY to many freaky combos of capital and lower case letters with footnumbers, headnumbers and positive and negative symbols = one... aneurismed brain's happiness at learning something that doesn't involve "yes sir, yes ma'am" = priceless..