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?
I agree, I don’t think OP’s example was a great example of what OP’s actually looking for!
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.
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.
You’re right. They’re all in the Health&Beauty section.
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.
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.”
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.
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!)
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.
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Silverware is named after the material it was originally made from; silver.
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.
If you read the thread, OP is clearly looking for objects where a material is the entire name of the object.
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.
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.
Saran Wrap is no longer made from Saran.
But was it ever called just “Saran”? I have only ever heard it called Saran Wrap, plastic wrap, or cling film.
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.
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”.
But at one point, the clothes iron was simply a heavy lump of cast iron.
I thought about adding this one, but when I looked it up, I found that they are still 25% nickel, 75% copper.