In article , rickman wrote:
wrote on 9/26/2017 6:31 PM:

Nothing sticks to polythene.

Are you in the UK? Is that what we call polyethylene? How does it happen
that we end up with different names for things like common plastic?

Tradition. It dates back at least as far as the day when we Americans
decided we couldn't afford to spell the new metal "aluminium" due to a
severe shortage of printers' slugs for the letter "i". :-)