Faulty Lines - Geoscience Community Adoption?

In fairness to the media I admonish in the previous post, a contemporary search for "fault lines" produces a link to a mainstream governmental geology site which uses the term. It's a curious development, perhaps representing a desire on the part of some geoscientists, at least those employed on the USGS's public relations side, to cater to mainstream media.


The USGS page includes this statement:

Faults are different from fault lines. A fault is a three-dimensional surface within the planet Earth. At the fault, rocks have broken. The rocks on one side of the fault have moved past the rocks on the other side. In contrast, a fault line is a line that stretches along the ground. The fault line is where the fault cuts the Earth's surface.

(The last quoted sentence should read, "The fault trace is where the fault cuts the Earth's surface," and, therefore, the first should read, "Faults are different from fault traces." Of course, much of the linked web page would need to be rewritten with such changes.) 

Despite the USGS examples (there are more than the one link), most of the results from the search produce links to sites and posts by non-geoscientists, which supports my original assertion: fault lines is a term that did not originate nor is appropriate within geoscientific research.

Another such term is deep time, as applied to geological and cosmological time, measured in billions of years. John McPhee, a popular science writer, introduced the term in one of his books, Basin and Range. Subsequently, some geoscientists and cosmologists have adopted the term, particularly in popular works. Like fault lines, deep time doesn't seem to have crept into technical research publications.