Over the years Ive noticed that geographers have a tendancy to make up words. Human geographers are particularly notorious for it but physical geographers have their moments too.
I overheard a conversation on the bus during the Spain fieldtrip last January between one of the human geography lecturers and one of the physical geography lecturers (for anyone in the class that might happen to read this, it was Fiona Smith and JR).
Anyway, Fiona is trying to talk to JR about some human geo nonsense and JR is clearly not interested because every other word that comes out of her mouth he responds with "thats not a word" and she argues that it is and then ploughs on with whatever crap shes talking only to be met a few seconds later with "thats not a word". That went on for about 10 minutes with me sitting in the row of seats behind them trying desperately to contain my laughter, failing miserably and ending up in silent convulsions with tears running down my face. Gotta love JR.
That was a bit of a tangent, but it explains the title of this blog. And its funny. Maybe you had to be there though...
Aaaannnyway, todays example of geographers making words up comes from my Glaciology lecture this morning:
Firnification - the process of turning snow into ice. Involves densification. (Densification - compacting snow to make it more dense (obviously) to turn it into ice)
Firnification, totally not a word.
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