Cutlery mustard spoon and lettuce fork. Steel was always used for more utilitarian knives, and pewter was used for some cheaper items, especially spoons. From the nineteenth century, electroplated nickel silver (EPNS) was used as a cheaper substitute for sterling silver. In 1913, the British metallurgist Harry Brearley discovered stainless steel by chance and this metal has come to be the predominant one used in cutlery. An alternative is melchior, corrosion-resistant nickel and copper alloy, which can also sometimes contain manganese and nickel-iron. Plastic cutlery is made for disposable use, and is frequently used outdoors for camping, excursions, and barbecues for
Polarity item in cross-linguistic semantics. Polarity item In linguistics, a polarity item is a lexical item that can appear only in environments associated with a particular grammatical polarity – affirmative or negative. A polarity item that appears in affirmative (positive) contexts is called a positive polarity item (PPI), and one that appears in negative contexts is a negative polarity item (NPI). The environment in which a polarity item is permitted to appear is called a "licensing context". In the simplest case, an affirmative statement provides a licensing context for a PPI, while negation provides a licensing context for an NPI. However, there