(Sometimes humorous,sometimes provocative, Fodder is a recurring online Press-Register feature that spotlights water cooler discussion topics of regional or national interest. Read more Fodder here.)

Listen to the latest descriptions being offered of the oil washing ashore or hovering offshore and you'd think you'd been invited to an enticing breakfast at the beach: orange mousse, rainbow sheen, large pancakes.

But those are just some of the words being used as everyone from journalists to scientists struggle to describe the different forms the oil is taking as it floats about in the Gulf of Mexico after rising to the surface from the Deepwater Horizon site.

Here are some of the top terms being used so far, as compiled by the mousse paddy-wading staffs of the Press-Register and the Mississippi Press:

Orange mousse:

As appetizing as this may sound, it generally refers to weathered batches of oil that have been whipped into a gooey froth. No word yet what they actually might taste like.

Emulsified oil:

This is what a more formal person might call the mousse. Also see: weathered oil.

Spill:

This is that nice, big umbrella term for the oil leak, as if a coffee cup tipped over (reminiscent of the

.) Of course, as everyone now knows, the oil isn't so much spilling as leaking or, by many accounts, "gushing."

Orange streamers:

These are long strands or fingers of orange mousse floating in the water.

Windrows:

Sounds like Scooby-Doo trying to say "windows." These can be black, orange or reddish in color and look sort of like streamers, though you might see groups of them. Sort of like fingers of oil out in the sea, rather than just one streak.



Streaking sheen, metallic sheen, light sheen, heavy sheen:

As multiple sniping commenters have noted, no you don't need to follow a line of wrecked cars and high-dollar hookers to find this sheen. It's what you call the oil when it's atop the water in a fairly glistening fashion.

Slick:

What's the difference between sheen and a slick? Sometimes there's no difference, though "slick" usually refers to greater areas of darker concentrations of oil. More like what you'd see near ground zero of the oil spill site.

Tarballs:

One staffer notes that this term is not only being used often, but almost always incorrectly. Tarballs, he explains, look like rocks, while what most people are seeing are bits of oil that have broken apart from larger globs in the surf. (See definition re: "glob" below.)

Glob:

A glob of oil is just that, a glob. Nothing fancy here. Move on.

Pancake-like tarballs

: If this sounds like something you'd prefer not to step in, you're right. Picture a dairy farmer's field here and you pretty much get the idea.

Orange pancakes

: Pancake-shaped tarballs, but orange in color.

Patties:

Pretty much interchangeable with pancakes, though you might hear someone refer to a "mousse patty," whereas not so much a "mousse pancake."

even put a size on patties, saying a patty is an oil deposit bigger than 3.9 inches but smaller than 39.3 inches. In other words, it's smaller than a patch, but bigger than a tarball. That help you any?

Light streams:

A stream is more or less like a windrow or finger or streak of oil. It basically refers to a column of color of a relatively narrow width set against a wider expanse of a more healthy color.

Sorbent boom:

For something to be absorbent, it first needs to be sorbent. That said, why this word (not the two-letter-longer more common one) is used for boom material that absorbs oil is beyond us.

Community responder:

This is a ten-cent term for any paid cleanup worker. It sort of sounds volunteerish, but isn't really.

Hard boom:

This is either boom that isn't so sorbent or the sound a community responder makes when hitting the floor after consuming too much tequila.

VOO:

An acronym for the Vessels of Opportunity. Note that "vessels" is plural, a point there had been some debate about.

Oiled:

One thing BP can be thanked for is the steady rise of the word "oil" being used as a verb. Everything from booms to beaches to boats has been described as having been "oiled."

Scat teams:

Think less about groups of jazz beboppers and more about "scatology" when defining these teams of people who scout the beaches looking for signs of oil.

Blotches of oil:

We're not sure that "blotch" means anything other than "blotch," though the same person using this term in an aerial survey also referred to "thick, heavy spots of oil," so apparently there is some difference there.

Brown gelatinous material:

This was the somewhat generic reference made to a substance that floated up by a boom in Mississippi, but was later determined to be "a mass of decaying algae mixed with components of fish oil and diesel fuel." Now that oughta whet your appetite.



Melted chocolate brownies

: Apparently this is what happens when a nice-sized oil patty sits in the sun for a while. Note that while we haven't really heard this term used much, we included it just because we applaud its descriptiveness.

Weathered oil:

This is a good catch-all term for something that looks different from Texas gold Jed Clampett saw bubbling up from the ground. Note that everything from mousse to patties consists of weathered oil, which is what we call oil that has been subjected to exposure to sun, wind and time.

Glom:

We've seen it written that this is what happens when wet waves of oil slap the shoreline. The oil "gloms" ashore.



Junk shot:

Sounds like an airball in basketball, but actually refers to a wad of old golf balls and other, similar materials that might be fired into a drilled cavity to clog up an oil spill.

Top kill:

A term that came and went as a household word, this refers to the procedure in which heavy muds are injected into drill pipes in an effort to stop the flow of oil and enable a well to be capped with cement.



Top hat:

Fred Astaire would not wear this. It's a term given to a type of containment dome placed over a leaking wellhead to try to siphon off some of the leaking oil.