Rachel Douglas Sep 28, 2013:

"slippery slope"... ... is a common expression in politics and is used in logic to describe a type of argument about causality. Some say that it originated with a poem about the Battle of Gettysburg, 150 years ago, when the Union line held Cemetery Ridge against Pickett's charge, in which the Confederates attacked up a slope that became slippery with blood.

"In Will Henry Thompson's 1888 poem, "High Tide at Gettysburg," the defending men in blue held the line:
'They smote and stood, who held the hope
Of nations on that slippery slope.'"
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/01/opinion/01iht-edsafire.htm...

danya Sep 28, 2013:

"slippery slopes" are a find) my conclusion was that perhaps those guys who fell knew what a лог is only approximately

Rachel Douglas Sep 27, 2013:

Grass-grown gully Yes, "gully" can be a technical term for a certain type of eroded formation, but it's also used more loosely for long depressions that are smaller than a ravine, gorge, valley, or vale, yet larger than a ditch. A grass-grown gully is called a grass-grown gully: https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&tbm=bks&q="Grass-grown g...
But I don't think the reader here needs to be told whether or not it's grassy. The description says that two drunken guys on a motorcycle crashed down its slippery slopes.

danya Sep 27, 2013:

hmm Found out that ravine is a bigger gully. What is a grass- grown gully called then?

danya Sep 27, 2013:

some nit-picking Gully is more like овраг, it has loose soil in it's lowest part, whereas лог is overgrown with grass, slopes and all