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A look at some weird words, and why we need them, and where you can find their definitions.
When you get into geology, the first thing you need is a dictionary. There are so many different things to keep track of—landforms, minerals, fossils and the parts of fossils—and so many of the words aren't English. Great language though it is, English just isn't up to the task.
Lots of non-English words stand for geologic things that English speakers never knew about. Consider the weird stone hillocks of desert Morocco that the natives call kess-kess. Nothing else in the world is quite like them. Consider the peculiar floodbursts that come from beneath the glaciers of Iceland that the natives call jökulhlaups (here's an article about them). If the natives have a word for it, geologists around the world will use that word. But what if there isn't a word for it because it's never been seen before? Then we recycle that great dead language, Latin.
Modern science began with Latin, in an accident of history. The cradle of science was in Europe, four or five centuries ago, when the educated classes of every country learned Latin. It was the common language of the Catholic Church and diplomacy and science. Isaac Newton described the law of gravity in a book, Principia Mathematica, that was written entirely in Latin. Samuel Johnson, in the 1700s, was as proud of his Latin poetry as he was of his Dictionary. Many people learned Greek, too, as part of their education.
So when geology took its name, two hundred years ago, it was natural for people to plunder the ancient wordbook when they needed a new word. And Latin has lots of pieces to build them with—the same with Greek. "Geology" itself is an example: the Greek geo- is earth and -logy is word or discourse—in a word, earth science. This is also why mathematicians recycled the old letters of the Greek alphabet.
Scientific Latin/Greek is a simplified version of real Latin and Greek. It's very compact, and you can easily build words like ignimbrite. What's that? Well, what would you call a kind of rock that forms when molten lava and ash from an explosive eruption falls in a pile and fuses together into a solid rock? Ignis is fire, imbro- is rain, and -ite is stone in scientific Latin/Greek. So ignimbrite is a good label for something that we never had an English (or French or German or Russian or Italian . . .) word for.
Latin is still essential for describing fossils, where you can't be really sure what an extinct organism's parts were used for, or where there are nothing to talk about but different doohickeys. Hence we have, for example, the orthotriaene, "a sponge triaene in which the cladi are oriented close to 90 degrees to the rhabdome"—so says the American Geological Institute's Glossary of Geology. Elsewhere, Latin is losing its hold. For instance, what everyone calls black smokers would have some Latin name if we'd found them a hundred years ago.
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The AGI Glossary has all these words and 40,000 more, and I open my copy every day. It's a pricey but indispensable tool for me. But the Web has lots of free glossary sites worth bookmarking, and I've gathered a list of them for you.
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