detritus
dih-try-tuss
noun
Rubbish, litter or debris
‘Detritus’ is one of those words I whip out when I want to impress people, because I’m the sort of insufferable person who does that. Why settle for the humdrum word ‘rubbish’ when you can whip out the fancy, Latinate ‘detritus’? ‘Wow,’ your conversation partners will think, ‘what an interesting person he must be.’
While the modern word is used to refer to any sort of waste material, in its earliest iterations ‘detritus’ was restricted to the realm of physical geography, and referred to the process of things gradually wearing down through the action of friction, sort of like how sand is formed.
This becomes obvious when we learn that the ultimate root of the word is the Latin verb ‘deterere’ meaning ‘to wear away’.