Scrambling

Scrambling (also known as alpine scrambling) is "a walk up steep terrain involving the use of one's hands." It is an ambiguous term that lies somewhere between hiking, hillwalking, mountaineering, and easy rock climbing.Canyoning often involves scrambling.

Alpine scrambling is a term applied to scrambling in high mountains like the Alps and the Rockies of North America, and may not follow a defined or waymarked path.The Mountaineers climbing organization defines alpine scrambling as follows:

Overview

Although ropes may be sensible on harder scrambles, sustained use of rope and belay counts as climbing; typically, the use of ropes in scrambling is limited to basic safety uses.

While much of the enjoyment of scrambling depends on the freedom from technical apparatus, unroped scrambling in exposed situations is potentially one of the most dangerous of mountaineering activities. For this reason mountain walkers are advised to carry a rope on harder scrambles. Scramblers are also advised to know their limits and to turn back before they get into difficulties.

Scrambling (military)

In military aviation, scrambling is the act of quickly getting military aircraft airborne to react to an immediate threat, usually to intercept hostile aircraft.

Historical use

The term was used during the Battle of Britain, when RAF fighter pilots waited on the ground for Chain Home radar observations to detect oncoming enemy aircraft, at which point a telephone call would reach each fighter airfield (part of the Dowding system) and those air crews available would be scrambled. Every minute lost before take-off would be advantageous to the enemy, as those minutes could have allowed a pilot to gain extra height above the advancing plane formations. Information passed to the scrambling fighters included location and height (Angels - hence phrases such as Angels One Five for aircraft approaching at 15,000 ft) and a rough estimate of numbers. Unidentified aircraft were known as bogeys while known enemy ones were called bandits. The scramble order was communicated to alert pilots at the base by the loud ringing of a bell.

Scrambling (linguistics)

Scrambling is a common term for pragmatic word order. In the Chomskyan tradition, every language is assumed to have a basic word order which is fundamental to its sentence structure, so languages which exhibit a wide variety of different orders are said to have "scrambled" them from their "normal" word order. The notion of scrambling has spread beyond the Chomskyan tradition and become a general concept that denotes many non-canonical word orders in numerous languages. Scrambling often (but not always) results in a discontinuity; the scrambled expression appears at a distance from its head in such a manner that crossing lines are present in the syntactic tree. Scrambling discontinuities are distinct from topicalization, wh-fronting, and extraposition discontinuities. Scrambling does not occur in English, but it is frequent in languages with freer word order, such as German, Russian, Persian and Turkic languages.

Examples

The following examples from German illustrate typical instances of scrambling: