A sherd is a fragment of pottery. A shard is a fragment of anything else. (Well, almost anything. A fragment of a deer’s pizzle wouldn’t be called a shard because it’s biological, but you know what I mean. Glass, metal, that kind of thing.) So why the difference? Because ‘sherd’ is an abbreviation of ‘potsherd.’ See what you can discover if you happen to bump into a highly intelligent and erudite American?
And do you know what just occurred to me? You might remember me mentioning a favourite bed time story my mother used to tell me when I was but a flea on the dog’s dinner. It was called ‘The Wig and the Wag and the Little Yellow Bag.’ For all the relevance that title had to the story, it could just as easily have been called ‘The Sherd and the Shard and the Little Pack of Lard.’ But now I’m being pointlessly whimsical, so let’s continue…
Maddie is a proper archaeologist now, you know. She’s Dr Maddie. I do so like to boast that little old uneducated me knows a real archaeologist, although I’m reminded of the fact that I did sort of know another archaeologist quite a long time ago. He was the man my wife took up with after we separated and his name was Cliff. When they engaged in cohabitation, they took my pet rabbit, Beaumont, with them. It was a blessing for dear Beaumont (he was a big white Dutch rabbit) because my lifestyle had been such that he’d had to spend a lot of his time confined to a hutch. After the translocation he was able to spend much more time wandering their garden at will, and he repaid their kindness by digging up the vegetables in their vegetable plot on an entirely voluntary basis. Weren’t they lucky?
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