Survey: Nondescript

[Viridian]

One of the advantages of a visual format is that you can see what the quicksand looks like. From a writing perspective, quicksand can be tough to describe, and a trap is becoming too generic or scientific. A lot of us have personal preferences over the kind of sand encountered. If a written piece mentions quicksand, without any other description, what do you visualise the sand to look like?

[nachtjaeger]

Definitely riverbank sand/slit. Something that straddles the line between soft muddy sand and soft sandy mud.

[PM2K]

I love it all, but prefer peat. It just looks so evil and bottomless...

[Duncan Edwards]

My real answer is "Yeah". Am I odd in thinking certain situations call for certain substances?

[Viridian]

It makes sense. That said, some situations or environments can have various "kinds" of quicksand (e.g. a walk in the woods). I'm curious what people think of when someone encounters quicksand sans description.

[nachtjaeger]

Could have sworn I replied to this earlier today.

Anyway, you're not odd. For example, in a story or movie set on Dartmoor in the UK, one wouldn't picture sandy quicksand. Peat would be the thing, or one of the closely related swampy muds. Or for a desert scene, the QS would most likely appear to be dry sand. But for me, absent any context the archetypal quicksand is silky river sand and fine silt.

My real answer is "Yeah". Am I odd in thinking certain situations call for certain substances?

[bart1997]

...

[Billie Bonce]

Quicksand is sand that has become quick and has nothing to do with mud or clay or peat. So I did vote for the beach sand-option. Reading stories of people sinking in a pit of "quicksand" right in the middle of a forest or even worse a bog feels just odd.

I totally share this opinion, and by the way I voted for the same option.

However, it is not so for the Americans who are in vast majority here. They say 'quicksand' about any stuff in which a human can sink and get stuck, adding to such stuff mystical properties of sucking a victim in it like a vacuum cleaner.

For me, giving a honest answer to this poll was impossible. Quicksand is a foreign word for me. Previously, this word meant a lot for me, feeding my fetish - it meant a rare and dangerous condition of either wet beach sand or dry desert sand. After I discovered this community the word lost any special meaning to me, now it is just virtually anything quicksand-fetish-related. If I try to figure out what they are speaking about in a written text, I first try to understand what kind of text is it. A news report, a scientific article, a mainstream prose, a fetish prose, or just some blogger's blah-blah-blah. In a scientific article I would expect to see real quicksand and nothing else. In a mainstream prose I would expect to see real quicksand, too, most likely - dry desert quicksand. In a news report it can be anything. In the remaining two cases - even worse. If it wasn't described clearly, the overuse of the word 'quicksand' would rather irritate than please me.

A fetish model in a video: "What kind of stuff is it? Is it... a QUICKSAND???"
Me: "No, lady! It is an artificial mud pit in a studio."