Geology: rock, strata, faults and ore

German geology names its faults by what the rock does, and it takes the words from ordinary verbs. That has one awkward consequence. Die Abschiebung is the normal fault, where the block above the fault plane has slid downwards; in the news the same word means deportation, a person removed from the country by the authorities. Both come from abschieben, to push something off, and neither sense has pushed the other aside. A sentence about eine Abschiebung im Buntsandstein is about rock, and nobody reading it thinks of a court. Context settles it, just as it settles die Verwerfung, which is a fault in the rock and, in a newspaper, an upheaval: soziale Verwerfungen. The partners are built the same way — die Aufschiebung pushes up, die Überschiebung pushes over — so once one of them is clear, the others follow.