Word of the week: plastic

As we give our credit and debit cards a workout in the next few weeks, it's hard to imagine using the noun “plastic” as when it first appeared in English in 1598, in an art treatise: “Carving is nothing else but a painful imitation of plastic,”. Back then it meant the art of modelling in clay or wax, a sense of which we still see a hint in “plastic surgery”. Derived from a Greek word meaning “moulding”, it was very handy when the highly mouldable substance we now know as plastic was invented in the early 20th century.