the.com/fault
the crack that runs through rock, blame, and tennis serves alike
means A defect, mistake, or responsibility for something going wrong — and, in geology, a fracture in the earth's crust where rock has shifted.
from From Latin 'fallere,' to deceive or fail, which slipped into Old French as 'faute' (a lack, a failing) before crossing into English. The original sense was 'an absence or deficiency' — a falling-short — which is why the same root gives us 'false' and 'fail.' The geological 'fault' (a break in rock) and the tennis 'fault' (a failed serve) both branch from this idea of something gone amiss; the silent 'l' was later re-inserted by scholars eager to flaunt the Latin.
- earthquakes
- San Andreas fault moves about 2 inches yearly
- tennis
- two faults in a row cost you the point
- latin root
- from fallere, meaning to deceive or trip
- geology
- the deepest faults reach 10 miles down
- electrical
- a ground fault can trip in milliseconds
san andreas fault — 830-mile fracture in california running from the gulf of california to cape mendocino
dead sea transform fault — major geological fault running 600 miles from turkey through israel to the red sea
alpine fault — 2,000-km fault line in new zealand that caused the 7.8 magnitude kaikōura earthquake in 2016