Chossy Climbing Conditions

Hello, welcome to A Way with Words.

Hello, this is Chris Anderson from San Diego, California.

Hey, Chris, welcome to the show.

Hey, thanks so much.

What can we do for you, Chris?

I was calling about the word chossy, that’s C-H-O-S-S-Y, and the word is used in climbing and mountaineering to describe crumbly rock or unsafe rock that will fall apart if you pull it or stand on it, and it can be extremely dangerous.

So with a lot of climbing terms, a jug means a big hold, like a milk jug, or a small hold that you can only fit your fingers in, like a pocket. It’s called a pocket.

But this word, chausse, is not exactly related to the definition, at least in English, and I’ve never understood the origin of it or why we describe chausse to be dangerous, crumbling rock.

And I’ve been climbing for 10 years.

And this is widespread throughout the climbing community?

That’s correct.

Okay.

Yeah, if you say that rock is chossy or it’s a choss pile, that just means it’s really bad rock and you shouldn’t be climbing there.

Probably one of the worst places I’ve climbed is, and scariest climb I’ve done is in Temple Crag in the Sierra Nevadas.

And Crag is a place that you go climb, and it was this 1,400-foot spire, and it was very chossy.

One of my friends actually pulled a refrigerator block-sized rock about 1,000 feet up, and it went crashing down this gully.

It was very scary.

Oh, my goodness.

Okay, so chassis is a very significant word in your world.

That’s correct.

Yeah, and it means exactly what you said, something like rock that’s crumbly, that you just can’t, it just won’t support your weight, and it tricks you into standing on it, right?

Yeah, even if you were to pull on it like my climbing partner did, it would pull out, and that’s really dangerous because if he was directly above me and that happened, that refrigerator-sized block would have hit me.

But luckily, he was up and far to the right, so we both saw it careened down this goalie.

And, you know, in addition, not only pulling on it is dangerous, but if you were to place a piece of protection like a spring-loaded camming device or a passive gear like a nut or a tricam, if you fell on that, then the force that went on the sides of that crack would break the rock apart and then you would keep falling.

Okay.

Very significant.

Okay.

All right.

So very bad news.

Tossie is a really weird word.

I would have guessed that it was some old French term or something like that because there’s so many mountaineering terms that come from French or just some kind of geology term.

But I haven’t seen it any farther back than the 20th century.

Have you, Grant?

It’s not that old at all.

No, I think we probably know the same resources, right?

Yeah.

And it means what you described.

And all we can tell is that it comes from the word chas, which may be a humorous variant of chaos, which doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to ears in this part of the world, but maybe in Britain it does.

Yeah, there’s some suggestion that it’s—people say chas instead of chaos is a joking pronunciation because that hard ch as a K sound is just not native to English.

It’s not normal English.

So I don’t know.

It’s very, very mysterious.

But everyone and all the resources confidently explain that it comes from the humorous pronunciation of chaos.

And I’m like, huh?

Yeah?

Really?

Of course, if you’re stepping on unstable ground and you’re sliding down, that’s going to feel like chaos, I guess.

It is.

Chausie, if you find yourself amongst the Chausie rock and you start falling amongst that, then that would be extremely chaotic.

I’ll tell you from firsthand experience.

The Oxford English Dictionary has a letter from Margaret Mitchell, the author of Gone with the Winds, not in the book, but in one of her private letters, where she uses the word choss to mean a chaotic situation.

So that’s from 1937.

And then I found the phrasal verb choss up in a 1945 citation from the slang lexicographer Eric Partridge.

It’s a military term meaning to wreck.

And I could see the relationship there possibly if you choss something up and you’re introducing chaos.

Sure.

Well, Chris, thank you for introducing us to this term.

No doubt if our listeners use this term outside of climbing, we will hear about it.

But thank you so much for bringing it up.

Hey, thank you so much.

Thanks for answering my question.

I hope you all have a great day.

You too. Take care.

Thanks, Chris. Bye-bye.

Bye.

Bye.

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