What’s the difference between a plaster and a Band-Aid? One’s a term used in England for “adhesive bandage” and the other is an American brand name that’s almost completely generified. The use of plaster for this type of bandage in Britain is allusion to the traditional use of sticky pastes to ensure the bandage stayed in place. This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “Plaster Bandage”
Hi, you have A Way with Words.
Hi, this is Elizabeth Erickson from Dallas, Texas.
Hi, Elizabeth. Welcome.
Hey there.
Hi, thanks so much for having me.
Sure.
Delighted. What’s going on?
Well, my question is this. I’m born and raised in Dallas and from very northern parents.
And so I had, you know, a lot of, I had been living in London and had thought that I prepped my vocabulary for all of the word differences.
You know, things like eggplant being aubergine and, you know, pants are really underwear over there, things like that.
But I had been living in London and studying at the university there.
And about three weeks in, somebody came and asked me for a plaster.
And I just kind of looked at them funny and had, you know, racking my brain for what they could mean, had no idea what they meant by a plaster.
And the woman who was from the U.K. was increasingly frustrated with me that I didn’t know what she was talking about.
And someone else came over and gave her a Band-Aid.
And so I finally made the connection that apparently in the U.K. a Band-Aid is a plaster.
So I just was curious where the origin of that came from because it’s, you know, just not at all a common word that I would associate with a bandage.
Nor is it something that anyone had ever told me or I had found in any of my research before moving there.
Plaster is really interesting.
They used to, when you had a cut or a simple wound, there were a variety of different compounds that you could make with all different kinds of substances that you’d slather on there to disinfect or protect or even to seal it,
And then you would wrap a bandage around it.
And a lot of these plastery substances were sticky.
So you could actually make them dip your bandages in this substance.
And then when the bandage dried, you could just store it until you needed.
And you’d wet it.
And I printed out some instructions.
Like you could lick it.
Some of them would say lick the bandage and then apply it to the wound.
And then the substance would become wet again.
You’d wrap it around your wound and let it dry.
And there you go.
It would stay on.
I mean, that’s what you want.
You want a bandage that will stay on so you don’t have to keep holding it there.
Yeah, on top of a poultice.
Yeah.
It’s like a poultice.
Yeah, but it’s a tiny poultice sometimes.
We’re not talking like a big lump of substance necessarily, right?
It doesn’t have to be that much.
We’re talking like a paper cut or, you know, I don’t even know, a nail scratch or something like that.
Something you would use a Band-Aid for.
Yeah, something you would use a Band-Aid for.
There you go.
And so over time, this became formal because the factories started making these bulk items.
And they were a little different from the ones you might make yourselves.
And then vinyl and plastic were introduced, and they were a little different still.
And they were called sticking plasters originally, and now they’re generally just plasters.
So the language changed a little bit, and the thing itself changed a little bit, and the distance between the original thing and what we have now in the UK as a plaster is very different.
They accomplished the same task, but they looked different.
And it’s funny, we have a similar history in the United States with Band-Aid, which is a brand name that has almost become a generic, not quite, where they had incredible marketing power.
They owned the marketplace for a long time.
They were the only ones really making a very successful product that you could apply to a wound.
Was it sort of a newer, was plaster, you know, end of the 19th century kind of a thing, or did it show up earlier than that?
What was the time frame that it really, that you guys found it first started showing up?
It really became, well, the plaster as the sticking plaster was well in hand, well established in the 1800s.
And then sticking has slowly disappeared.
You’ll really only hear it now in historical fiction of very old people who are trying to be formal.
Well, this girl was 20-something.
But did she say sticking plaster or just plaster?
Just plaster.
Yeah, she would just say plaster.
Almost nobody will say sticking plaster unless they’re being ironic or they’re very old or they’re trying to sound old-fashioned on purpose.
Okay.
And do you suppose if you’d asked her for a Band-Aid, would she?
She probably would not.
She gave me a very quizzical, annoyed look, so I’m sure that she probably would have no idea.
But they are very, I mean, because of American media, I mean, Brits are usually pretty, our terminology more so than we are with theirs.
Yeah, because the Band-Aid was a Johnson & Johnson product starting in the 20s, the early 1920s.
Okay.
Well, thank you so much.
That totally answers my question.
That was great.
Thank you so much, Elizabeth.
Thanks for calling.
Bye-bye.
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