# A plastic glass, an online paper, and other material contradictions **URL:** \ **Category:** In My Humble Opinion\ **Created:** [April 14, 2022, 7:52pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/a-plastic-glass-an-online-paper-and-other-material-contradictions/962836 "2022-04-14T19:52:17Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 4
**Author:** ![EinsteinsHund](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/einsteinshund/32/8400_2.png) [@EinsteinsHund](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/EinsteinsHund)\ **Post date:** [April 15, 2022, 3:04am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/a-plastic-glass-an-online-paper-and-other-material-contradictions/962836/61 "2022-04-15T03:04:46Z")
> [@Exapno\_Mapcase](#): > > For a real suggestion, what about fur coat? They still are made but in increasingly small numbers. But are they still called “fur” coats? Or isn’t anyone who wears a fake fur coat eager to point out that it’s not real fur? ---
**Author:** ![Riemann](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/riemann/32/3133_2.png) [@Riemann](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Riemann)\ **Post date:** [April 15, 2022, 3:12am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/a-plastic-glass-an-online-paper-and-other-material-contradictions/962836/62 "2022-04-15T03:12:25Z")
> [@Exapno\_Mapcase](#): > > The paper in a “scientific paper,” as per the OP, morphed into a sense of an article or essay as early as the 1660s. It is far more of a concept than a physical object like powder. I agree, I don’t think OP’s example was a great example of what OP’s actually looking for! > [@Exapno\_Mapcase](#): > > For a real suggestion, what about fur coat? You realize that OP is not just looking for things that are now made of something else, right? The name must be the material. So not “fur coat”, but maybe “a fur” could work. I guess it hinges on whether _imitation_ material is a different material - i.e. the material synthetic fur is arguably a subset of the material fur, it does not have a different name. ---
**Author:** ![Exapno\_Mapcase](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/exapno_mapcase/32/1051_2.png) [@Exapno\_Mapcase](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Exapno_Mapcase)\ **Post date:** [April 15, 2022, 3:14am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/a-plastic-glass-an-online-paper-and-other-material-contradictions/962836/63 "2022-04-15T03:14:26Z")
Fake or faux fur coats were called fur coats or “furs” for short for decades. Since I don’t know anyone with either right now, I won’t hazard a guess. ---
**Author:** ![TriPolar](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/tripolar/32/3008_2.png) [@TriPolar](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/TriPolar)\ **Post date:** [April 15, 2022, 3:16am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/a-plastic-glass-an-online-paper-and-other-material-contradictions/962836/64 "2022-04-15T03:16:05Z")
You’re right. They’re all in the [Health&Beauty section](https://www.walmart.com/ip/Greciansoap-NWS5-5-6-in-Natural-Sea-Wool-Sponges/682664118?athbdg=L1700). ---
**Author:** ![Little\_Nemo](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/little_nemo/32/3120_2.png) [@Little\_Nemo](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Little_Nemo)\ **Post date:** [April 15, 2022, 3:16am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/a-plastic-glass-an-online-paper-and-other-material-contradictions/962836/65 "2022-04-15T03:16:59Z")
> [@Riemann](#): > > > [@Little\_Nemo](#): > > > > silverware > > Silverware is not a material. But silver is. ---
**Author:** ![Riemann](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/riemann/32/3133_2.png) [@Riemann](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Riemann)\ **Post date:** [April 15, 2022, 3:19am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/a-plastic-glass-an-online-paper-and-other-material-contradictions/962836/66 "2022-04-15T03:19:17Z")
> [@Little\_Nemo](#): > > But silver is. Silver (meaning silverware) was suggested earlier. It’s uncountable… to be an object it’s a question of whether you could say something like “a piece of silver” to mean a fork. I don’t think you can. A piece of silver is what Judas was paid with. It’s a piece of silverware. ---
**Author:** ![digs](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/digs/32/14889_2.png) [@digs](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/digs)\ **Post date:** [April 15, 2022, 3:19am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/a-plastic-glass-an-online-paper-and-other-material-contradictions/962836/67 "2022-04-15T03:19:29Z")
Thinking of clothing made me realize that the white tents that we’d erect over models being photographed in bright sunlight are called “silks”. May have been made of that in the murky past, but cotton or polyester in my professional lifetime. A photographer once said of Seattle “In LA, we often refer to a very slightly overcast day as a three-silk day. In Seattle, every sunny day is like that.” ---
**Author:** ![Little\_Nemo](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/little_nemo/32/3120_2.png) [@Little\_Nemo](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Little_Nemo)\ **Post date:** [April 15, 2022, 3:20am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/a-plastic-glass-an-online-paper-and-other-material-contradictions/962836/68 "2022-04-15T03:20:21Z")
There are a number of vegetarian products that are labeled as the animal product they’re supposed to replace. Things like vegetarian chicken nuggets, vegetarian hamburger, or vegetarian pork rinds do not contain chicken, beef, or pork. ---
**Author:** ![digs](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/digs/32/14889_2.png) [@digs](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/digs)\ **Post date:** [April 15, 2022, 3:21am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/a-plastic-glass-an-online-paper-and-other-material-contradictions/962836/69 "2022-04-15T03:21:02Z")
> [@Riemann](#): > > And silver is not the name of the object. Before any family holiday, my mom asks us to all “pitch in and handwash the silver!”. Even when it’s stainless steel. (opinion: the people here who are working so hard to disqualify others’ answers are sucking the fun out of this topic… because many of those are really interesting word usages!) ---
**Author:** ![TriPolar](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/tripolar/32/3008_2.png) [@TriPolar](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/TriPolar)\ **Post date:** [April 15, 2022, 3:21am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/a-plastic-glass-an-online-paper-and-other-material-contradictions/962836/70 "2022-04-15T03:21:58Z")
They are still called furs, real or not. As in “I’m not putting my fur on that bed so two drunken idiots can sneak away and have sex on it”. In my circles fake is the standard. Or at least they all say they’re fake. ---
**Author:** ![Little\_Nemo](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/little_nemo/32/3120_2.png) [@Little\_Nemo](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Little_Nemo)\ **Post date:** [April 15, 2022, 3:23am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/a-plastic-glass-an-online-paper-and-other-material-contradictions/962836/71 "2022-04-15T03:23:32Z")
> [@Riemann](#): > > > [@Little\_Nemo](#): > > > > But silver is. > > Silver (meaning silverware) was suggested earlier. It’s uncountable… to be an object it’s a question of whether you could say something like “a piece of silver” to mean a fork. I don’t think you can. I feel I was following the OP. > I got to thinking: are there other objects named after the material they’re made from, and the name persists even when the thing is made of a different material? Silverware is named after the material it was originally made from; silver. ---
**Author:** ![Exapno\_Mapcase](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/exapno_mapcase/32/1051_2.png) [@Exapno\_Mapcase](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Exapno_Mapcase)\ **Post date:** [April 15, 2022, 3:26am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/a-plastic-glass-an-online-paper-and-other-material-contradictions/962836/72 "2022-04-15T03:26:08Z")
Good to know. Tinfoil was mentioned, but not tin can, called “tins”. Lead pencil has to go, though. Pencils were never made from lead, and the use of lead for graphite started in the early 1800s. ---
**Author:** ![Riemann](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/riemann/32/3133_2.png) [@Riemann](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Riemann)\ **Post date:** [April 15, 2022, 3:26am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/a-plastic-glass-an-online-paper-and-other-material-contradictions/962836/73 "2022-04-15T03:26:31Z")
> [@Little\_Nemo](#): > > Silverware is named after the material it was originally made from; silver. If you read the thread, OP is clearly looking for objects where a material is the entire name of the object. ---
**Author:** ![TriPolar](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/tripolar/32/3008_2.png) [@TriPolar](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/TriPolar)\ **Post date:** [April 15, 2022, 4:23am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/a-plastic-glass-an-online-paper-and-other-material-contradictions/962836/74 "2022-04-15T04:23:34Z")
I’ve never seen a reference to a pencil actually using a lead ‘lead’. Lead was used as a writing implement though, in the form of a stylus, leaving clear markings on dark materials like slate, copper, iron, and allegedly papyrus. I suppose it’s possible someone embedded a lead wire in a piece of wood or wrapped a lead stylus in some kind of material creating a functional pencil. But that has nothing to do with why pencil lead is called lead. It is called lead because it is made from graphite which was once called _black lead_ because it resembled actual lead ores. The teacher of this thread is really strict so I’m guessing pencil lead does not qualify at all because it’s always been made out of a form of _black lead_ and still is, or _black lead_ isn’t lead and never has been. ---
**Author:** ![Left\_Hand\_of\_Dorkness](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/left_hand_of_dorkness/32/7156_2.png) [@Left\_Hand\_of\_Dorkness](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Left_Hand_of_Dorkness)\ **Post date:** [April 15, 2022, 4:36am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/a-plastic-glass-an-online-paper-and-other-material-contradictions/962836/75 "2022-04-15T04:36:29Z")
> [@Riemann](#): > > I agree, I don’t think OP’s example was a great example of what OP’s actually looking for! No, I’m pretty clear on what I’m looking for; but I’m glad to clarify, if you’re not. “A paper” is called that because it’s an object created with paper, just as a glass is called that because it’s an object created with glass. The 17th-century secondary meaning isn’t contradicting the point; without that secondary meaning, “a paper” wouldn’t meet the first qualification, of a countable object whose name is identical to the material from which it’s traditionally made. Until very recently, almost all papers were created from paper. These days, however, a paper is often created without the use of paper. Thus meeting the second qualification, a countable object that’s not necessarily made with its namesake material. Collective nouns don’t count. ---
**Author:** ![Darren\_Garrison](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/darren_garrison/32/92_2.png) [@Darren\_Garrison](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Darren_Garrison)\ **Post date:** [April 15, 2022, 4:46am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/a-plastic-glass-an-online-paper-and-other-material-contradictions/962836/76 "2022-04-15T04:46:47Z")
Saran Wrap is no longer made from [Saran](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saran_(plastic)). ---
**Author:** ![Riemann](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/riemann/32/3133_2.png) [@Riemann](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Riemann)\ **Post date:** [April 15, 2022, 4:55am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/a-plastic-glass-an-online-paper-and-other-material-contradictions/962836/77 "2022-04-15T04:55:22Z")
> [@Darren\_Garrison](#): > > Saran Wrap But was it ever called just “Saran”? I have only ever heard it called Saran Wrap, plastic wrap, or cling film. ---
**Author:** ![Chronos](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/chronos/32/134_2.png) [@Chronos](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Chronos)\ **Post date:** [April 15, 2022, 2:23pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/a-plastic-glass-an-online-paper-and-other-material-contradictions/962836/78 "2022-04-15T14:23:24Z")
You might still occasionally find an old Canadian five-cent coin made out of nickel, but only very rarely any more, and American 5-cent coins old enough to be made out of nickel are basically nonexistant now. The vast majority of nickels nowadays are mostly zinc. Bandages are sometimes called “plasters”, especially on the other side of the Pond, even though most of them don’t contain any plaster. > [@Dewey\_Finn](#): > > How about an iron (as in a clothes iron)? Debatable. A clothes-pressing device nowadays is made out of steel (at least, the functional parts of it), but steel is itself mostly iron, and some alloys that are even less pure than what gets called “steel” are still called “iron”. ---
**Author:** ![Dewey\_Finn](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/dewey_finn/32/4222_2.png) [@Dewey\_Finn](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Dewey_Finn)\ **Post date:** [April 15, 2022, 2:24pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/a-plastic-glass-an-online-paper-and-other-material-contradictions/962836/79 "2022-04-15T14:24:13Z")
But at one point, the clothes iron was simply a heavy lump of cast iron. ---
**Author:** ![k9bfriender](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/k9bfriender/32/3283_2.png) [@k9bfriender](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/k9bfriender)\ **Post date:** [April 15, 2022, 2:29pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/a-plastic-glass-an-online-paper-and-other-material-contradictions/962836/80 "2022-04-15T14:29:52Z")
> [@Chronos](#): > > American 5-cent coins old enough to be made out of nickel are basically nonexistant now. The vast majority of nickels nowadays are mostly zinc. I thought about adding this one, [but when I looked it up](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nickel_(United_States_coin)), I found that they are still 25% nickel, 75% copper. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/a-plastic-glass-an-online-paper-and-other-material-contradictions/962836.md?page=3) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/a-plastic-glass-an-online-paper-and-other-material-contradictions/962836.md?page=5)