Ribbon fall. Gallery forest. You won’t find terms like these in most dictionaries, but they and hundreds like them are discussed by famous writers in the book Home Ground: A Guide to the American Landscape. The book is an intriguing collection...
An open book is a rock formation that looks just like its name. This specialized term is one of hundreds collected and explained in the book Home Ground: A Guide to the American Landscape. Such a rock formation is also called a dihedral. This is...
Chris from San Diego, California, says he and fellow rock-climbers use the term chossy to describe rock that’s dangerously crumbly. It’s probably a corruption of the word chaos. To choss up means “to wreck.” This is part of a...
The highly specialized vocabulary of people who work outdoors, communicating with sled dogs, a word from the sport of rock-climbing, church key, browse line, smeuse, nitnoy, mommick, zawn, zwer, boom dog, and I think my pig is whistling. This...
A rock climber in Omaha, Nebraska, wonders about the term beta, which her fellow climbers use to refer to information about a particular route. It comes from the old practice of using Betamax video to record information about a climb. A good...
Take a look back at some notable words and phrases from 2017: Remember path of totality? How about milkshake duck? Also, a committee has to choose a new mascot for a school’s sports teams. They want to call them the Knights, as in the fighters...