Master for Webs

Uhrichsville, Ohio, which bills itself as the Clay Center of the World, begins its National Clay Week Festival today. Humans have been using that earthy, plastic material for more than a thousand years; today we look at some old words still used to talk about materials argillic (that is, "of or relating to clay").

Potters have a number of special terms for clay-specific processes. For example, the process of making slip, a mixture of clay and water used to both decorate and cement clay, is known as blunging. The verb blunge (meaning "to beat up and mix in water") is itself a mix of blend plus plunge; the clay-based noun slip has an ancestor in the Old English word for "slime."

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