taffy-pull terrain
n.— «This Mars Global Surveyor (MGS) Mars Orbiter Camera (MOC) image shows an example of the extremely odd, seemingly scrambled layered rocks exposed by erosion near the deepest part of the deepest basin on Mars, Hellas. This pattern of eroded, and perhaps deformed layers was once exposed to the martian surface, then buried, and more recently exposed again. The story behind these layers is not really understood; some members of the MOC team have—for nearly 9 years now—taken to calling these features, “taffy-pull terrain.”» —“NASA Mars Picture of the Day: Scrambled Hellas” SpaceRef Oct. 3, 2006. (source: Double-Tongued Dictionary)
Further reading
The words tough, through, and dough all end in O-U-G-H. So why don’t they rhyme? A lively new book addresses the many quirks of English by explaining the history of words and phrases. And: have you ever been in a situation where a group makes...
Quiz Guy John Chaneski shares one of this take-off puzzles, where the object is to remove a letter from the beginning from one word to form another word. In this case, the letter is always S. For example, what two words are clued by “The...