I didn’t say etymology because this is not about how a word came to be or changed in form or meaning over time. Instead, this is an anecdote about word usage where the word and its meaning has not changed but the situation referred to has changed. That sounds rather confusing until you hear the story.
Have you ever wondered why the container for beans or corn or soup or tomato paste is called a tin can. The obvious answer is that it is made of tin, or used to be anyway. Preserving food and other substances in cans began in 1810 with the invention of the tin can. By 1813 the first tin can factory was canning food for the military in England (1,2).
Why was tin used? It has a high corrosion resistance and a low toxicity (3). Already by 1818, cans were beginning to be merely tin-plated rather than entirely tin. Today, cans are plastic lined to seal them and prevent corrosion. There was a period of time when BPA’s and other plastics were used that are problematic for health, but that has gone away.
So, steel cans are still called tin cans even though almost no cans were even tin lined after the 1950’s. Though I have wondered about the persistence of this term, tin can, for many years, I regained heightened interest in the subject when I went to recycle metals the other day. Check it out at, “Where do I put steel and other metals?”
What word usages can you think of that are leftovers from long gone situations?
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