Plastics

LINK  The advise Dustin Hoffman got in the Graduate: "Just one word.  Plastics."  

Again and again, I wonder if we could not have all of 202 with that as our starting place.  There is so much plastic everywhere these days that just making an inventory of our plastic stuff might consume the entire semester.

Among the topics I'd want to consider is the way the word's meaning has changed.  Once plastic was a quality of substances.  It indicated that those substances could be deformed, especially when heated.  This allows those substances to be extruded into molds and made into toys, water bottles, vases, spoons, shoes, keyboards, telephones, credit cards, recycling bins, trash bags, and many, many, many more items that we now describe as plastic because they are made out of substances that have been formed.  Now the word plastic has come to mean the substance itself.  If it refers to the substance's qualities, plastic is more often given the meaning cheap, fake, or disposable.  Indeed plastic has become a metaphor for those qualities as well as for something that lasts longer than it is used or that has no taste.