Questions and another suggestion or two:
Is this name meant to include, or exclude, underground rivers?
I infer icebergs are included, as they are frozen seawater, but ice over land is not?
(As the number of subtled distinctions increases, so does the necessity of making up a word.)
Other ideas, some along the lines of 'making up a word' (you provide separators as desired)
- topwater
- navwater (water in seas, rivers, lakes is nominally navigable by (small enough) craft -- even frozen, given mean enough icebreaker)
- gwater (g for either 'grounded' or 'Gaia', neither of which is perfect either...; ground water has another meaning of course)
- bedwater or beddedwater
- swater (for surface water, which I still like notwithstanding the critiques :->)
I promise not to provide any more ideas unless they are in fact great....
John
At 4:03 PM +0000 2/5/08, Jonathan Gregory wrote:
>Dear Nan
>
>> It might be worthwhile to consider replacing the term "sea_water" with
>> "water" in the standard name list, with sea_water aliased for backwards
>> compatibility.
>
>The reason for not doing that is that "water" is too vague. Not all water
>is seas, rivers or lakes; some is cloud water, some groundwater, instance.
>What we need is a word for a body of water whose bottom is on the solid
>Earth. Maybe we should just make a up a word! I believe that the word "gas"
>was invented from nothing, and that has caught on.
>
>Cheers
>
>Jonathan
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--
----------
John Graybeal <mailto:graybeal at mbari.org> -- 831-775-1956
Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute
Marine Metadata Initiative: http://marinemetadata.org || Shore Side Data System: http://www.mbari.org/ssds
Received on Tue Feb 05 2008 - 13:30:33 GMT
