Potholing or spelunking?

[martinr]

Just a bit of fun -

When you enter phrases into the Google Books Ngram Viewer, it displays a graph showing how those phrases have occurred in a corpus of books (e.g., "British English", "English Fiction", "French") over the selected years.

Here's what happens if you compare potholing with spelunking

What changed in 1985? From then on, spelunking races ahead!

However, if you compare caver and spelunker..... the cavers are in the lead

See also: abseil and rappel

 

[mikem]

Britannica book of the year: 1986
R. McHenry, Daphne Daume, J.E. Davis - 1986 - 990 pages - Snippet view
(Howard bass) SPELUNKING During 1985 several of the world's longest caves were extended. The longest of all. the combined Mammoth Cave- Flint Ridge system in Kentucky, increased to 484.3 km (301 mi) when explorers followed up new leads. ...

I imagine more US books were privately published after 1985.

Mike

 

[Maggot]

You can make scientific looking graphs say anything!

 

[solocavediver]

Of course spelunking is the American version. I read on an accident report that in the US it is sometimes used as a pejorative term for caver, meaning "a person down a cave who doesn't know what he/she is doing".  (four cavers went down a 90' pitch in high water without any ascenders. The attempted pull through went badly unstuck when the bottom of the pitch was 4' deep in water. One girl died, and the report made a thing about these being spelunkers rather than "real" cavers.)

 

[mikem]

Just don't rely on the Urban Dictionary's definitions (adult warning)

Mike