Idly flicking through today's Independent while waiting for what turned out to be the weirdest interview of all time, I found out why plastic surgery is so called when there's no plastic involved.

It's a mystery which has been bugging me in a low-level way since I was little, when I liked to secretly look at gross pages in the family encyclopaedia. The illustration concerned was of prostheses for every possible body part, arranged to look like a man made out of plastic. The encyclopaedia was, furthermore, the Joy of Knowledge, published by Reader's Digest in the 1970s and all the sections obsessively collected and bound by my Dad. (Yeah, that's where I get it from.) You can imagine how clunky and old-fashioned all these appliances were. My six year old self would generally dwell on this page for a few minutes, thrilled but nauseous, before flipping excitedly to the photograph of the man with elephantisis.

Anyway, the fact that the picture of the plastic man was on the plastic surgery page stopped me from realising many years ago that the reason it's called plastic surgery is because plastic also means "shapable" - from the Greek plastikos, meaning "suitable for moulding".

I'd transliterate it back into Greek characters, because I can, you know, but I bet you my outstanding student loan that if I did, your browser wouldn't support it.