It's the Word of the Day podcast for June 25th.
Today's word is flotsam, spelled F-L-O-T-S-A-M.
Flotsam is a noun.
It refers to the floating pieces that remain after a shipwreck,
or more broadly, to any floating debris or wreckage.
It's also used figuratively to refer to miscellaneous or unimportant material,
often in the phrase flotsam and jetsam.
Here's the word used in a sentence from The Vancouver Sun. The Vancouver multidisciplinary artist and educator works in various mediums using found objects and natural materials scavenged from the ocean's edge and the landscape of the city.
Detritus and Flotsam become parts of beautiful sculptures,
tableaus, and assemblages in this artist's hands.
English speakers started using the words flotsam, jetsam,
and lagen as legal terms in the 16th and 17th centuries,
with flotsam itself dating to the first years of the 17th.
The three words were used to establish claims of ownership of the three types of seaborne vessel-originated goods they named.
Flotsam was anything from a shipwreck.
The word comes from the Anglo-French word flotte, meaning to float.
And jetsam and lagen were items thrown overboard to reduce the cargo weight of a ship.
Lagen was distinguished from jetsam by having a buoy attached so the goods could be found
if they sank.
In the 19th century, when Flotsam and Jetsam took on extended meanings,