Discussions about eggcorns and related topics
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Chris -- 2018-04-11
Primarrumf. Disthen. Clod-tops. Argillipedoturbation. The jargon of geology can be as obdurate as it is intriguing. Not so for slickensides. That’s just what it advertises: slicken sides, where the movement of a fault has produced smoothed down, slicked up sides in the rock faces that have slipped and slid past each other. Here’s a gallery of slickensides. You can probably guess already what’s coming. An arcane eggcorn that may outdo the acorn.
Vertisols are heavy textured soils (with ≥ 60% clay) with shrink-swell characteristics. They lack the horizon development diagnostic of other horizons. Slickenslides and argillipedoturbation (disruption and mixing caused by shrink-swell of the soil mass) are diagnostic features of these soils. The horizons that result from this mixing are inverted of material and are called vertic horizons (e.g., Bv, Cv). As a mass of soil is displaced along a crack, the face of the mass can become very smooth and polished and these polished surfaces are called slickenslides. The horizons in which slickenslides are Bss, Ckss, or Cgss.
http://classification.soilweb.ca/vertisol/
Did you catch the last sentence? It’s almost “The horizons in which slicken slides…”
FIGURE 8 The Slickenslides Room. Helictite Cave has areas where faults are intersected by passage development. Here the slickenslides of a fault have dropped into the cave passage below. This makes for a dramatic passage where the scrapings or slickenslides are easily recognized on the ceiling and floor of this passage.
https://www.google.ca/search?q=%22slick … jwSku4DYAQ
There are 240 raw ghits for slickenslides against 300 for slickensides. Once you’ve seen slickenslides, it’s hard to go back.
Last edited by David Bird (2017-10-17 21:39:33)
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The eggcorn “slickenslide” occurs in the wild at 4% of the acorn “slickenside.” A phenomenally high ratio for an eggcorn. This puts it in the same company, frequencywise, of such classics as “damp squid,” “wreck havoc,” and “bellweather.”
Hatching new language, one eggcorn at a time.
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