semantic shift: "shrapnel"

[Garson O'Toole]

Below is another example of the semantic shift of the word shrapnel in
a discussion of the movie Earthquake from 1998:

Citation: 1998, Hollywood's Revolutionary Decade by Charles Champlin,
Page 95. (Google Books snippet view; so I am not certain of the full
context.)

Skyscrapers crumble in rains of plate-glass shrapnel. The Hollywood
Reservoir Dam yields to the aftershocks of a quake measured at an
unimaginable 10-plus on the Richter scale and three billion gallons of
water ...

On Mon, Jan 18, 2010 at 4:05 PM, Wilson Gray <hwgray at gmail.com> wrote:
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> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Wilson Gray <hwgray at GMAIL.COM>
> Subject:      Re: semantic shift: "shrapnel"
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> To me, too.
>
> -Wilson
>
> On Mon, Jan 18, 2010 at 2:26 PM, Jonathan Lighter
> <wuxxmupp2000 at gmail.com> wrote:
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>> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
>> Poster:       Jonathan Lighter <wuxxmupp2000 at GMAIL.COM>
>> Subject:      semantic shift: "shrapnel"
>> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>>
>> CNN reported this morning that Dr. Sanjay Gupta, in Haiti, operated on a
>> "12-year-old girl with shrapnel in her brain."
>>
>> Much later CNN identified the "shrapnel" as "a small piece of concrete."
>>
>> Usage note: OED 1989 defines shrapnel (in the broad and now usual sense) as
>> "fragments from shells or bomb."  The extension to bits of metal hurled out
>> in any kind of explosion (say, that of a grain elevator) would also seem
>> normal to me, though clearly "literary."  CNN, however,  is using the
>> word with no suggestion of metal or explosion, and this seems to me very
>> strange.
>>
>> JL

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