When I was a little kid, the thin metal on a roll in the kitchen was called “foil” in our house. When I moved away to the Deep South, I noticed everyone calling it “tinfoil”.
Well, it’s not tin. It’s aluminum- how long it’s been aluminum, I don’t know, but probably long before the people calling it tinfoil were born. Another example of this is people calling U.S. cents pennies. The U.S. has never had pennies. Is this a hold-over from colonial times?
I digress. Has anybody out there seen, held and used foil made of tin? How long ago was it? What was it used for?
Tin foil was commonly used for the capsule on cork-sealed wine bottles, until quite recently when it was replaced by plastic or plastic/aluminium laminates.
Kitchen foil hasn’t been made of tin for a long time, if ever - tin melts at the top end of oven temperatures, so it wouldn’t be much use.
furthermore, ‘tin’ is a generic colloquial term for metal in some contexts, for example:
‘tin cans’ - which may be made of aluminium or steel (plated with tin, or not)
‘tin roof’ = corrugated iron
‘tin legs’ - Douglas Bader’s prosthetic legs were described this way
‘tin man’ - in The Wizard Of Oz - was just a metal man, not necessarily made of tin (he rusted and needed oiling)
I’ve never heard anyone call a US cent anything other than a penny, so I would like a cite on how it’s not a penny. If 100% of the US population agree that something is called a penny, I’m thinking the thing is a penny, whether or not it’s exactly the same denomination or part of a denomination as a penny in some other country.
But then I support linguistic descriptivism rather than prescriptivism.
I think he/she means it doesn’t say “one penny.” It actually says “one cent.” Whatever. By the same reasoning, there are no nickels, either, just “five cents” coins.
I grew up in the midwest, and we called it “tin foil” even though it was made out of aluminum.
I stopped referring to it as tin foil about the same time pop started the switch to aluminum cans and from the throw away tops on the pop cans. What were those things called anyway?
My grandma in Virginia called it tin foil when I was a kid in the 80s. But we called it aluminum foil. Actually, we called it by its ghetto-fab name, “lemon-n-foil”. Some other ghetto-fab classic pronunciations were:
‘Stinchin cord’ for ‘extension cord’
‘rasslin’ for ‘wrestling’
‘phome’ and ‘spoom’ for ‘phone and spoon’
I expect it’s also by contrast to UK currency, where we have pennies, because the small unit of currency (not just the coin) is properly named a penny - collectively pence.
It always struck me as a bit odd that Americans called cents ‘pennies’, but I’m used to it now.
Most of these actually were tin at one point. Tin was a common metal for construction in the mid-19th century, before they learned how to produce aluminum by electrolysis it was THE cheap, light metal for everyday use, and many towns had a tinsmith (there’s still a tinsmith shop at Sturbridge Village). Tin cans were originally tin-coated (because it resisted corrosion better than uncoated steel), and tin smith DID make tin human figures as advertising, the way muffler places make human figures out of mufflers today. The Wizard of Oz’ Tin Woodsman is based on these, despite the anomalous fact that he rusts. Law officers really did have tin badges at one time. I don’t know whether tin roofs really existed, but it wouldn’t surprise me – they be less likely to rust.
Tin foil really was tin until WWII:
The foil covering wine bottles, by the way, used to be LEAD foil, not tin or aluminum.
I have seen tinfoil, in somebody’s old workshop or someplace, but I don’t think it’s been available for sale in my lifetime. One- and five-cent coins are always called pennies and nickels. Anybody who said “Excuse me, do you have a five-cent piece” would be treated like a poindexter.
Speculation: When the US became independent, it decided upon a decimal system of coinage, and used “cent” since it was 1/100 of the monetary unit, as opposed to 240 (for a pound, IIRC). But the name “penny” was already in use for this type of coin, and was popularly ascribed as such.
This stirred an ancient memory. My dad was a VP and the export manager for a foreign freight forwarder, and one of their customers was Alcoa. He was meeting with them for some reason and said “tin foil” whereupon they informed him rather huffily that it was *aluminum *foil.
Before the invention of aluminum and soft rolled mill steel, tin was the inexpensive metal that was easy to form into thin sheets.
Another anecdote: at one point church organ pipes were made out of tin, and when one in a Russian church crumbled into dust one winter, they discovered tin’s non-metallic phase which occurs at low temperatures.