Archive for September 2, 2014
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
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).