No I had some acetic anhydride available to me as well (back before it was scheduled). It was the whole job.

And did your professor tell you a story about pipetting glacial acetic acid by mouth? I'm beginning to suspect that maybe it actually happened to someone else. Or maybe it never happened, and got invented from whole cloth to justify the purchase of thumbwheel pipette controllers.

No not a thing about that. I am intrigued. He made us do everything in the fume cupboard though because we nearly blew ourselves up trying to make picric acid from the Jolly Roger cookbook :)

Ah. Perhaps it was a bona fide story. The prof was pipetting glacial acetic acid by mouth, and inadvertently exceeded the maximum recommended volume of the pipette in a single transfer. Later, the entire interior lining of his mouth and tongue peeled off (with no further ill effects). After that, he used rubber suction bulbs to pipette. And aren't you undergrads lucky we have the fancy thumbwheel/plunger pipette controllers in your labs now?

Since I couldn't do it the easy way in an acetylsalicylic acid lab, I had to peel my mouth with the lactic acid from a big bag of Herr's salt and vinegar chips.

You can derive asprin from salicylic acid very easily, I did it during undergrad chemistry 101.

Doing an esterfication and extracting something are still two different things. There is no aspirin tree, even if the pharmacological actions are the same.

Sorry this is probably my bad. I should have clarified this in the original post.

So?

No need to be unnecessarily pedantic, you knew what they meant.

When did the "I'll just examine 1 word and be overly pedantic to win an argument" thing start and why?

The day grammar was invented.