In Praise of Precision

If you care about using language precisely, does that make you a pedant or a good engineer? This question has been coming up a lot lately, because people regularly use embankment, cutting and earthwork as if all three words mean exactly the same thing, whereas to a ground engineer like me, they are completely different. What's the difference then? 

• An embankment supports the railway track above natural ground level and was built by human hands, usually from poorly compacted soil, ash or rubble (because the Victorians had no access to the kind of compaction plant we would use today). The only way to find out what an embankment is made from is to drill boreholes, because there are no decent construction records from the 1830s and it could vary dramatically over a very short distance. If an embankment fails, your track could be left dangling in mid-air like those photos from Dawlish.
• A cutting is where the natural ground level is higher than the railway, so material can fall off or be washed onto the track, which can cause a derailment (whether this material is soil, pieces of rock or rotten tree stumps). Cuttings are slopes within the natural ground, so there might be layers of different types of soil, bands of hard and soft rock or places where groundwater emerges onto the slope (springs). You need to consult the geological map (and ideally some borehole data) to work out the ground conditions.
• An earthwork is "any structure made of earth" ie it is the general team we use to mean both embankments and cuttings.

So why use language precisely? Firstly to aid communication, because you can then ensure that you're not talking at cross purposes, and secondly because the public expects professional people to know what we are talking about. 

If you went to the doctor and she told you that you'd just suffered a myocardial infarction, you would be entirely justified in asking for that in plain English please. That's medical jargon for "a heart attack". But how would you feel if the doctor showed no interest in using the plain English terminology correctly? "Oh yes, sorry, when I said you'd had a heart attack, I actually meant you have lung cancer". Totally different diseases, causes, symptoms and treatments. "Ah, well, they all affect your chest region so it doesn't really matter, does it?" Methinks you'd be getting yourself a new doctor sharpish!

But when you are surrounded by a community who use similar jargon to you, it is easy to forget this. For example, what are the consequences of writing on your drawings or briefing your staff that at this site you will be "working adjacent to a live road with moving vehicles"/"working next to live traffic"? I would guess that your first thought is: "I might be hit by a car or lorry". If you're an engineer, your next thought will be: "So what's the plan to keep us away from the traffic? Temporary traffic lights? Road cones? A banksman when turning on or off the main road?" You'd then be listening for some controls in the site briefing.

Unfortunately on the railway, "road" can be used informally to mean "track" (especially where one track is closed and the adjacent one is open). So I have actually seen drawings which used "working adjacent to a live road" to mean "working on a railway track which is officially closed (under possession) but there will still be engineering trains coming through for other sites nearby". If you read that drawing, would you be worried about being hit by a train? Or taking necessary precautions?

Well, we're all railway people - surely if anyone was confused, they would just ask? I certainly hope so, but the point is to communicate clearly, especially between the office and the site workers (potentially working in the middle of the night and a long way from home). The person briefing you on site (the COSS) is the last line of defence - if he or she is also confused by the information given to them, how can they tell you accurately what is going on? There's no shortage of Rail Accident Investigation Branch reports to demonstrate what happens when this goes wrong - people walking along one track believing it to be closed until a train is bearing down on them, getting a line blockage on the up line when the work is actually on the down, placing possession boards in the wrong place etc. 

So let's use plain English wherever we can, and if we're going to use jargon, let's use it correctly and consistently, because communication matters - and it can even save your life!

See also:

• ICE Triennial 1: On Desmond and Destruction 
• Learning to See - how knowing the name for something allows you to really appreciate it
• The Landslide Blog and Rocky Rex's Science Blog - two great example of how to explain ground engineering problems