pot metal
- noun
- Specialized
:
metal de bajo costo
- His collection included several pot metal figures that were painted in bright colors.
Examples
-
They're made of some kind of pot metal that strips out so fast.
-
They, however, were not plastic but painted pot metal.
Blog text (34) -
The final three decades of the century saw the introduction and marketing of the "two dollar pistol," which were very cheap handguns manufactured largely out of pot metal.
Academic text (2007) -
The reason I get my back up when restrictions are mentioned is that in my community, which has a similar pattern of violence to yours, we've tried a lot of restrictions, and they've amounted to little more than making legal guns more expensive so that only people with enough privilege to buy a $1000+ target pistol can own them legally, while any kid on the street with a grudge can get a pot metal Jimenez for a hundred bucks.
Blog text (6) -
The affordable cookware is made from pot metal, making it ideal for budget-conscious buyers.
-
Many cheap toys are crafted from pot metal to keep production costs low.
How Durable
- Specialized
40
2.8
536
1.4
- Specialized
12
3.7
- Specialized
231
7.0
- Specialized
Surface Forms
Morphology
The noun-noun compound is compositionally understandable: a B1 learner who knows 'pot' and 'metal' can infer it refers to a kind of metal associated with pots or cookware. However, the conventional sense emphasizing a cheap, low-quality alloy is a specialized, lexicalized nuance not fully predictable from the constituents, so the transparency is partial.
Etymology
Pot metal comes from the old practice of melting scrap metal together in a large pot to make simple pots and other cheap items. Because the metal was a random mix and not high quality, the phrase now means 'a cheap metal mix'.