Chrysti The Wordsmith: Talus - 1

Greetings and welcome to Christie the wordsmith hiking above Timberline one recent summer day. My friend Mary and I were discussing a colossal accumulation of rock rubble at the base of a nearby slope. While it looked like screech to me Mary called it Tellus. Now both of us living and playing in mountain country know just enough about geological terms to maintain that tallis and scree can both refer to slopes made up of fallen rock. But which word would apply in this case. And so back home again to the dictionary I went. My first stop was the Oxford English Dictionary which asserts that screenies parent is scary thought the old Norse word for landslide. A screen proclaims the Oxford English Dictionary is a mass of detritus forming a precipitous stony slope upon a mountainside. Directly from there I went to Tallis defined as a sloping mass of detritus lying at the base of a cliff. Its ultimate ancestor according to the Oxford English Dictionary is the French term Talula

meaning slope. To me tallis and scree are synonyms both referring to a mass of sloping detritus. One is French derived the other Germanic. But the matter may not be that simple as I found out while snooping around the Web in search of more descriptive and etymological information. Join me next time for an avalanche of insight on screen and tell us. I'm Christie the wordsmith. CHRISTIE The wordsmith is sponsored by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and Zoot enterprises a high tech firm in Bozeman Montana offering challenging careers and innovative solutions for the financial services industry. Zoot web dot com.