Blog279
Daily Notes on Poetry

6 November 2004. My entry of yesterday on "circloid" drew this, which I show as I got it, in case anyone is curious about cybertechnical details:

Response To Blog278 = You're on a slippery slope here.  Do we now have to fill
in squares, triangles and--gasp--parallelograms.  Do we now need the word,
Bushoid?

Edm
REMOTE_HOST: 172.201.94.185

I got no other information except that the e.mail was from [email protected]. But I know the culprit was Ed Conti because he's the only wit named Edm who could have committed this bit of humor. His criticism is good--the slippery slope part. But I do think there are times when identifying a thing that could be an outline or a filled in shape as one or the other is important, as in describing a visual poem with three red squares in it. What do I call the squares? "Two-Dimensional red squares?" "Filled-in red squares?" "Squaroids" seems quicker. On the other hand, "Oid" is not very accurate since it means "resembling," not "filled-in" or anything else really appropriate, and it certainly isn't self-explanatory.

I was leaning toward using "icle" as a suffix for outlines but "circle" is too strongly associated with its outline for "circlicle" to work. Consider, for instance, the verb, "to circle." So I came up with a fairly obvious not-great-but-adequate solution: "holi," meaning "whole," as a prefix for all sold geometric shapes. Unless there's already a word for such shapes I don't know about. Ergo, we have "holicircle," "holisquare," "holitriangle." "Holisphere," too. A balloon would be a sphere, the earth a holisphere.

Okay, it's around 11 in the morning as I write this. I hope to start serious work on the presentation I'm scheduled to give to some home-taught high school kids a week from this coming Monday. Since I hope to produce something entertaining, and will no doubt use pieces of what I come up with in my next few entries here, my blog should start being less tedious than it has been. I hope so, because I notice more people are starting to visit it (over double figues the past couple of days!)










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