A Gridiculously Clever Blog Post

Do you know what the following graph represents?

Sine on the dotted line.

If you tell that joke to the right audience, you’ll likely hear a triggle. (If you tell it to the wrong audience, you’ll likely hear the sound of tomatoes whizzing past your head.)

Triggle is a portmanteau, a combination of two or more words and their definitions.

trigonometry + giggle = triggle

In a similar vein, when the expression

13 + 5 · 0 – 4

is simplified to

13 – 4,

you might say that it has suffered from zerosion — the removal of a term because of multiplication by zero.

The following portmanteaux may be useful for your next math discussion.

bi·sect·u·al
adjective
attracted to both halves of an angle

grid·ic·u·lous¹
adjective
inviting derision on the coordinate plane

cha·rad·i·us
noun
a segment from the center to the circumference based on false pretenses

bi·zarc
noun
an unusual curve

graph·ish
adjective
diagrammatically disreputable

sub·line
adjective
inspiring awe in only one dimension

trig·a·ma·role
noun
a complicated and annoying trigonometric process, such as verifying that
cot x + tan x = sec x · csc x

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¹ It came to my attention after the publication of this post that Gridiculous is (a) a trivia game developed for Windows 8 and (b) an HTML5 responsive grid boilerplate (though the link to the site seems not to be working).