The term "Plastic" covers a wide variety of synthetic materials with different physical properties- - - - -Nylon, Teflon, Rayon, Dacron, etc.- - - -and those are just the petroleum-based products produced by DuPont. There's a story about how those names came to be. One of the very early "computers" back in the 1940's was tasked by DuPont with combining random syllables to suggest names for new products, resulting in the above names for the various products their chemists were churning out. One such name was rejected, after a researcher from another country pointed out that in his language, the word meant "outhouse"! That story was shared with me by a DuPont chemical engineer who also ran one of the race cars my father built engines for.
Jerry
