MORAINE

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Dr. Goodword
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MORAINE

Postby Dr. Goodword » Tue Nov 29, 2005 11:57 pm

• moraine •

Pronunciation: mê-reynHear it!

Part of Speech: Noun

Meaning: 1. A mound or ridge of rocks, earth, and rubble deposited by a glacier. 2. A flower bed for Alpine plantings, formed by pouring soil or other rooting material over a bed of rocks for drainage.

Notes: Today's Good Word offers two adjectives to choose from: morainic or morainal, both describing any relation to moraines, as morainal deposits or morainic lakes.

In Play: Moraines left by a melted icecap are called terminal moraines: "The Lost Lakes of Pennsylvania are a large, pristine remnant of natural forests and wetlands on Pennsylvania's terminal moraine, left here 10,000 years ago by North America's last great glacier." (Interstate 80 generally follows this terminal moraine across Pennsylvania.) The other sense of today's word is useful in the garden, "I've built a small moraine in my rock garden to nurture a little pipsissewa, snowberry, Dutchman's breeches, and a bit of trailing arbutus."

Word History: Today's Good Word comes from French moraine, which descended from morena "mound of earth", from Provençal morre "muzzle". The Provençal word comes from a projected Vulgar Latin word, *murrum, about which nothing is known other than it could have existed. (Today's Good Geological Word comes to us from Patricia Castellanos, to whom we owe a mound of rubble-free gratitude.)
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gailr
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Postby gailr » Wed Nov 30, 2005 10:41 pm

This WOTD reminds me of the Kettle Moraine (north and south), not too far from my old stomping grounds. Looking at this photo, I can almost hear the insects swarming as friends and I hiked up and down (and up and down and up and down) the grounds...

-gailr

Grogie
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Postby Grogie » Thu Dec 01, 2005 6:08 am

I didn,t know that moraine had a gardening connotation also. Wonderful!


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