It's time for the next iteration of the geo-blog thing known as The Accretionary Wedge! And the theme for AW#35 is, "What's your favorite geology word?"
My big Glossary of Geology has some 40,000 words in it, and every time I open it (at least 10 times a week) there is something delightful on the page. Quaquaversal! Psammitic! Meromictic! Realgar! Geology is truly a feast of words. But I didn't open my glossary until after I had listened to my inner ear, which lisped to me the low and delicious word Palinspastic.
Palinspastic means "restored to its original form" and is used for a map or section of an area that has been deformed. In the case of California, where I live, a palinspastic restoration is something like putting Humpty Dumpty together again because so much of the state has been shuffled, like cards being dealt off a deck, by the San Andreas fault—and the fault itself has changed its configuration many times over the years whenever the balance of tectonic forces gave it a choice of a straighter path. That is, the deck has been dealt from the top, bottom and middle at various times, then redealt in some cases. Humpty has had many previous appearances, more like a Mister Potato Head.
The word was coined by Marshall Kay in 1937, but palinspastic exercises are one of geology's oldest projects: the re-creation of past worlds. The fruit of this work can be seen in paleogeographic maps, which go back a good half-billion years.
Comments
I thought for a moment this was going to be a bit of topical political humor. Is the etymology of your favorite geology word Latin, and what is the translation of its parts?
One of my favorites has to be “porphyry” because it took me so long to memorize the correct spelling. That and I’ve been core drilling in various types porphyries for 40 years.
as a word it’s not super-exciting to roll off the tongue, but the term superplasticcreep has always been a fave. sounded like a punk band name to me…
My favorite geologic word is a very nice word. I tell the students I work with in elementary schools that Geologists have a very funny sense of humor. Then I show them my very nice specimen of Gneiss. Looking (to me) like the word should be pronounced “Ga-nis” we all laugh because it is really pronounced like “nice”. It was a good thing for me that the movie, “Gnomeo & Juliet” was a big hit with the elementary crowd. They really liked the silent G connection and get my favorite “Geo Joke”.
I coudn’t wait to see what “favorite geology word” Andrew had come up with. Interesting, what is one person’s favorite may be another’s nemesis, because it may be looked on as an obscure word that’s hard to both spell and remember what it means! It all depends on what your favorite subfield within geology is. For me, I like “rapakivi”, which shows that my own favorite area is petrology, and not structural geology! P.S., “gneiss” is indeed pronounced “G-nice” in German, from wich the word is derived; somehow along the way in importing it into English, we just dropped the hard g sound, which really does belong there.
Lyman, “palin-” means again or repeated and “-spastic” is from spasm, meaning pull. So it refers to pulling things (backward) repeatedly. Marshall Kay is best known among old-school geologists for his elaboration of the geosyncline model, for which he had lots of different terms, now obsolete.
I like ‘volcaniclastic’. Such rocks are fairly common in my area, and they reveal a history that isn’t very evident from surface features. When I tell someone that a particular rock was probably formed from of volcanic ash and pebbles, some say, ‘Oh, that must have come from up by Mount Shasta.’ (Recent volcanism, but quite far from here.) Then I can give them a little lecture on local geological history, and plate tectonics.
My all time favorite, and it does indeed roll off the tongue, is
‘bituminous’… not exactly geology in a true sense, but still a wonderful word!
“Jökulhlaup” I used to think “jackalope” to help me remember the term.
Nice word (wink) yabetcha (wink) (winkwink) (wink)…
my favorite word is “xenolith” which is my name giving to me by my teacher…….
“autochthonous” – what else?