Eyebrow exercise...

There is one sentence in the current translation that troubles me:

Опоки – породы беловатого цвета, легкие, тонкопористые, липнут к языку.

The opoka is off-white, light, fine-grained, and sticks to the tongue.

This was a sentence that was supplied by the client (and as an aside, the quality of such sentences in this document is head-and-shoulders above the stuff that's usually inserted, though it still requires editing). What raised my eyebrows was that last part, "sticks to the tongue."

I turned to my trusty Google to see if there is any mention of "sticks to the tongue" as a kind of property of rock, and sure enough, there is (Handbook of Rocks, Minerals, and Gemstones by Walter Schumann). As all I was interested in was to confirm that such a criterion was not unheard of among geologists, I am not going to pursue this further, but it makes me wonder: what kind of person would put an unknown substance on their tongue to see if it sticks?

I am reminded of the several thousand times we've been exposed, in TV police dramas, to the routine of the cop cutting into a bag of white stuff and using a finger to taste it. Somewhere, I recall learning that this was pure fiction as far as real life is concerned, but I digress... Furthermore, I need to finish my quality check.

Cheers...