  We study a new mechanism of wave/electron scattering in multi-mode
surface-corrugated waveguides/wires. This mechanism is due to specific
square-gradient terms in an effective Hamiltonian describing the surface
scattering, that were neglected in all previous studies. With a careful
analysis of the role of roughness slopes in a surface profile, we show that
these terms strongly contribute to the expression for the inverse attenuation
length (mean free path), provided the correlation length of corrugations is
relatively small. The analytical results are illustrated by numerical data.
