Okay, now I just know they’re making up words.
I think I read that book back in the 70s…
I don’t remember hearing about “regoliths” when I was in college. I will have to drop regolith into my daily conversation now and then. If rego = king and lith=rock, I don’t see how they came up with regolith for accumulated dust. I was expecting something, well, a little more regal.
In this case the first element doesn’t come from the Latin, but from the Greek. A quick gander at Wikipedia tells us:
The term regolith combines two Greek words: rhegos (ῥῆγος), “blanket”, and lithos (λίθος), “rock”. George P. Merrill first defined the term in 1897, writing:
In places this covering is made up of material originating through rock-weathering or plant growth in situ. In other instances it is of fragmental and more or less decomposed matter drifted by wind, water or ice from other sources. This entire mantle of unconsolidated material, whatever its nature or origin, it is proposed to call the regolith.
Now “blanket” certainly makes sense. BTW - if I understand these things correctly - if the Latin term for “king” had been used the word should have been “regilith”, and thus the G conventionally pronounced as a J. How much difference one letter makes…
All looks like Leaverite to me unless of course it’s Trasherite, one can never be too sure about these things from just a photo.