These terms and more are being offered by Dolores Hayden, a professor of architecture, urbanism and American studies at Yale University, as ways to describe aspects of urban sprawl.

A capacity crowd of about 280 people in the University of New Mexico's Northrop Hall Auditorium heard Hayden talk Monday on the history of suburbs since the 1840s.

"A Field Guide to Sprawl," the title of the presentation, is also the title of a book by Hayden that will be published in June. In the book, as in her lecture, she uses aerial photographs of sprawl to illustrate what the words mean.

A boomburb, she explained, is a fast-growing suburb.

A zoomburb is one that's growing even faster.

Snout houses have garages bluntly pointing out at the street. Subdivisions in which all houses face the street with such garages are "snoutscapes."

A ball pork is a sports stadium built with public money for the benefit of a privately owned athletic team.

And litter-on-a-stick is advertising billboards.

Hayden, whose previous books include "The Power of Place: Urban Landscapes as Public History" and "Building Suburbs: Green Fields and Urban Growth, 1820-2000," said she wants to assist nonspecialists who find it difficult to "grapple with the vocabulary and specialized and impenetrable discussions of architectural planning and preservation and real estate slang."

She said she wants to give sprawl "a vocabulary that's accessible to every American citizen - a vocabulary of placelessness."

Hayden, who was invited to speak by the UNM School of Architecture and Planning, had plenty of other choice terms to be used by people who might otherwise be "at a loss for words" in talking about sprawl.

For starters she would redefine sprawl. "It's not just spreading out awkwardly," she said. "Sprawl is low-density, scattered, automobile-dependent development" created in a "political economy organized around unsustainable growth."

"Leapfrogging," which Hayden also called "polka-dot development," is often seen at the outer edges of sprawl, as new housing developments jump over stretches of empty land to create large, isolated islands of of new homes, she said.

"Ground cover" is construction of cheap buildings - she used self-storage facilities as an example - that are built to temporarily occupy land until it can be developed more profitably for housing.

"Putting parsley around the pig" is how developers make individual buildings and entire subdivisions more attractive by adding minimal landscaping.

"Edge nodes" are commercial and office centers "surrounded by fast food and discount stores" and parking lots but with no residential component and no sidewalks or other comfortable pedestrian space.

A "power center" is a collection of "big box" buildings - Hayden uses Wal-Marts as examples - that "destroy shopping malls as well as main streets" all across the country. A "stretch mall" is a power center that can be a couple of miles long.

Too often, for developers, the goal is to "build it, make your money and drive away," Hayden said. The result is "a landscape based on the idea of unrestrained growth" and architecture that only "reflects commercial interests."

"I'm not anti-suburban development," Hayden said. "But we have to make a strong stand against sprawl." SLDT

Frank Zoretich is a reporter for the Tribune