Broken pieces of pottery, commonly known as shards, are also referred to as sherds by professional archaeologists. This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “Shards and Sherds”
Hello, you have A Way with Words.
Hi, this is Ben.
Hi, Ben. How are you?
Hi, Ben. What’s going on? Where are you?
I’m very good. I’m from Tallahassee, Florida.
Well, welcome to the show. How can we help?
Well, I’ve had a long-standing question. I’m an archaeologist, and we have an odd term in North American archaeology for broken pieces of pottery.
In Britain and most of the world, they’re always called shards, but here we call them shards.
Well, we know there’s a made-up word, more or less. It’s not in any dictionary. And I’ve always thought that it was to differentiate North American archaeology from European archaeology.
Ben, Ben, you’re reading way too much into this, buddy. It’s simpler than that.
Shard, S-H-E-R-D, meaning a piece of broken pottery, is just simply a variant spelling of shard, S-H-A-R-D. And what’s happened over the years, archaeologists have simply come to prefer shard as their term of art. And everywhere else, people tend to use shard.
There is a little bit of difference where you may, as an archaeologist, also say shard, but only for broken glass and never for broken pottery. And the British do use shard.
Yeah, we definitely reserve shards for glass.
Yeah, the British do use shard, and they say pot shard as well, which is the longer form of it. And both shard and shard go back to Old English, and they are variant spellings from the earliest day. And they have lived side by side as twins, meaning almost the same thing for many centuries.
Yeah, Ben, when I…
Yeah, yeah.
I went through an archaeologist phase when I was in my 20s. And I worked on a dig in Israel. And we definitely said shard.
You said shard in Israel. Was it a British leadership or American leadership?
It was Israeli.
Israeli, no Israeli. Were they more British tradition or American tradition?
I would say more British tradition. But that’s when I realized that instead of sitting around washing shards, I wanted to write about sitting around washing shards.
That can be really tedious work, right, Ben?
Oh, yes, very tedious work.
Well, thanks for calling, Ben.
Well, thank you guys very much.
Take care now.
Take care. Bye-bye.
You too.
Let’s dig into the roots of English.
Email words@waywordradio.org.
