Mark Twain on geology jargon

Being a chief mate, he was a prodigious and competent swearer, a thing which the office requires. But he had an auxiliary vocabulary which no other mate on the river possessed and it made him able to persuade indolent roustabouts more effectively than did the swearing of any other mate in the business, because while it was not profane it was of so mysterious and formidable and terrifying a nature that it sounded five or six times as profane as any language to be found on the fo'castle anywhere in the river service.

[He] had no education beyond reading and something which so nearly resembled writing that it was reasonably well calculated to deceive. He read, and he read a great deal, and diligently, but his whole library consisted of a single book. It was Lyell's Geology, and he had stuck to it until all its grim and rugged scientific terminology was familiar to his mouth, though he hadn't the least idea of what the words meant. ...All he wanted out of those great words was the energy they stirred in his roustabouts. In times of extreme emergency he would let fly a volcanic irruption of the old regular orthodox profanity mixed up and seasoned all through with imposing geological terms, then formally charge his roustabouts with being Old Silurian Invertebrates out of the Incandescent Anisodactylous Post-Pliocene Period and damn the whole gang in a body to perdition.

Mark Twain in Autobiography, as quoted in Marcia Bjornerud's Reading the Rocks, p32.