Important words for clayer, ceramists, ceramicists, potters, clay artists, and users of dipping tongs.
- Breath, The real or imagined relationship between the absolute skin of an object and the actual or perceived volume of air or just plain volume within. The sense that the form is created by pressure or vacuum or movement of air within the volume described by the outside of a pot or the actual volume with in.
- Bones; The stucture of a wall of a vessel usually thrown. Bones do not need to be visible before firing as particle allignment can make them visible after a firing. In this sense even slabs have bones and they depend on how the slap is rolled.
- Erumpant: ready to burst
- Inflection Point; the point in a curve or the line in a form where the curvature goes from being concave to convex. It is in mathematics the place where the second derivative passes from positive to negative.
- Asymotote, Asymtotic; as a curve gradually flattens out the asymtote is the straight line it approaches but never reaches.
- Flocculant; A material when added to a slip makes the particles floc together. Flocculants make liquids more viscous with the same amount of water. Usually flocculants used in ceramics are salts of magnesium and calcium.
- Deflocculant; A material that when added to a slip in small quantities lowers the viscosity. Sodium Silicate, Soda Ash, and Darvan® (Vanderbilt) are common deflocculants in ceramics.
- Thixotropy; The property that makes some materials more fluid when stirred or shaken and causes them set up upon resting.
- Eutectic; A minima in the liquidus chart. A Eutectic mixture is a mixture that will melt at a lower temperature than mixtures near it. It is not always the lowest melting mixture of two materials, just a relative low. Eutectic can also be used to describe a temperature as well as a mixture.
- Liquidus; The line on a phase diagram that shows the temperature where the entire mixture will be come liquid for any mix of the materials the diagram describes. (definition needs better clarity)
- Phase Change; When a material changes from solid to liquid or gas, but also when it changes from one allotrope to another as in alpha to beta quartz.
- Allotrope; different structural arrangements of the same chemical makeup. A good example are the allomorhs graphite, graphene, and diamond. But
- Saturated Solution; a solution that has as much of a given material as it can hold dissolved in it at a specific temperature. For example at a given temperature say 50 degrees water is saturated with salt, when so much salt is dissolved in it that you cannot dissolve any more.
- Intendedness; The property of an object where all of its apsects look like they were designed with intent. The actual intent does not have to be there but just the appearance of it. Intendedness is related to but not identical to a Baus Haus principle of design that all aspects of an object should be designed. I coined the term after many decades of teaching to describe what I was getting at when talking to students.
- Rat Tail Handle; A handle that gets thinner and thinner with an anemic lower attachment.
- Line Blend
- Triaxial Blend
- Functionless Sculpture; A sculpture, clay or other material, that serves no function.
- Clayer; any one involved in clay including artists, collectors, gallery owners, hobbyists, and toilet makers. The term was coined by me because we often left important people out of the group when we discussed "us".
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