Many specialized subjects have a vocabulary of all their own, a working vernacular. I’m uncertain as to whether conservation is a specialized subject, but we do have words in regular usage at our work that may not be something you hear in everyday conversation. I’ll do my best to define some obscure terms that you might not come across every day, or ever, for that matter. Read closely and maybe you’ll end up with some new working words to impress your friends and neighbors. Here goes:

Let’s start with hummocky. I fully expected this term to be neatly defined in the glossary tucked in the pages of my well-worn Preble County Soil Survey. It’s not. I cracked open Webster to find a hummock defined as ‘a low mound of earth,’ with hummocky listed as the adjective form but with no further definition. The Oxford English does us the favor of defining hummocky as ‘abounding in or characterized by hummocks; having the surface rising irregularly in hummocks.’ I feel like a picture would be most helpful here, but I don’t have a picture of hummocks to share with you.

Loess is the next word of wonder that comes to mind. Don’t say Lois, it’s pronounced low-ess. My Preble County Soil Survey glossary delivers the goods on this one. Loess is a fine-grained wind-carried deposit consisting dominantly of silt-sized particles. This means it is soil picked up from one place and dropped off later on. To give an idea what silt looks like in relation to what you might already be familiar with, silt-sized particles are larger than clay particles but smaller than sand.

Alluvium is pronounced something like uh-loo-vee-um. Alluvium is soil material, such as sand, silt, or clay, that has been deposited on land by streams. Alluvium is water-carried and can be many different particle sizes, in contrast to loess which is wind-carried silt particles that are all one size.

When we see the word horizon, many of us would think of what we are gazing at around sunset. In soils terms, a horizon is a layer of soil approximately parallel with the surface that has distinct characteristics produced by soil-forming processes. In basic terms, a horizon is another word for a layer in the soil. If you started at the surface and dug straight down, you would typically encounter several different soil horizons (or layers) before you eventually hit bedrock.

This is by no means a complete list of all the obscure terms we come across in our line of work. The four aforementioned terms relate primarily to soils. Complete books could be written to define all the other terms we use for engineering, drainage, fertility, forestry, weed control, and other topics. While I won’t attempt to pen a book with the material, future articles will cover more definitions from on the job.

Reach BJ Price at 937-456-5159 for more information.