Why “diluvialism” is a great word
DILUVIALISM — [Noun] The obsolete geological doctrine that attributes terrestrial features—such as distinct rock strata, erratic boulders, and sculpted valleys—to the action of a single, universal, catastrophic flood, specifically the Noachian Flood. From diluvial (from Latin diluvium, "flood, deluge") + -ism (forming nouns of action, system, or doctrine). Unlike uniformitarianism, which explains the past through the slow, observable processes of the present, or catastrophism, which admits a series of violent events of unspecified origin, diluvialism stakes everything on one archived, sacred cataclysm. It is the fossil bed read as a drowned menagerie, the glacial erratic seen as a dropped ballast-stone from a foundering world, and every canyon interpreted as a scar from a receding, world-covering tide—a testament to the human longing to make the patient handwriting of deep time conform to the margins of a single, sacred page.