January 29, 1997

potsherd

An article I read had the line "advertisements, the potsherds of modern society...." My dictionary defines "potsherd" as a pottery fragment. Any input?

A potsherd is a pottery fragment, but what matters here is the usual context of the word. Potsherd is chiefly found in archaeological writings--there aren't many places nowadays you'll encounter broken clay pots outside of an archaeological dig--and the connotation of the word is that a potsherd is a pottery fragment that has some archaeological value.

The article you cite is using a figurative sense of the word, playing on the 'archaeological value' meaning. A dictionary definition of this use might be 'any remnant of a civilization that is of value to later historians'.

Potsherd is formed from pot in the usual sense of 'a container', and sherd, an archaic variant of shard 'a fragment'. The word is first found in the early fourteenth century.