A.Word.A.Day --elliptic

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Apr 29, 2024

This week’s theme
Words from geometry

This week’s words
elliptic
triangulation
squarely
tangent
asymptote

Cartoon: Mike / SpikedMath

Previous week’s theme
Words related to the senses

A.Word.A.Day

with Anu Garg

I love pizza. I also love to make pizza, from scratch. My own dough, my own recipe. When I stretch the dough with my own hands, no rolling pin involved, it morphs into a shape that could generously be called a circle (technically, a cylinder).

Let’s just say you wouldn’t want to calculate pi based on my pizza. And please, don’t try to guess my high school geometry (my fave subject!) grade by its wonky circumference.

In pizza-making, as in life, it’s not just about getting every angle right and every curve smooth. Pizzitude is much more than technical details. The proof of the pizza, as they say, is in the eating.

That said, while geometry may not be everyone’s favorite subject, it’s everywhere, even in pizza: a square box, round pizza, and (nearly) triangular slices.

Even beyond pizza, geometry flavors our everyday language. Whenever you look at something from a new angle, avoid going in circles with your logic, or draw parallels between two events, you’re tapping into the language of shapes and spaces.

This week, we’ll dive into five terms from geometry that are used metaphorically.

elliptic

PRONUNCIATION:

(i-LIP-tik)

MEANING:

adjective
1. Marked by extreme economy of expression in speech or writing.
2. Cryptic, ambiguous, or obscure.
3. Marked by ellipsis: the omission of one or more words from a sentence.
4. Relating to or shaped like an ellipse.

ETYMOLOGY:

From Greek eleipein (to come short). Earliest documented use: 1715. The word is also used in its longer form, elliptical.

USAGE:

“Engagingly poetic -- though, at times, maddeningly elliptic -- the novel interweaves Manod’s canny observations with other villagers’ memories, songs, and folktales.”
Daneet Steffens; An Island Community Contends With Nature, War, and Outsiders; Boston Globe (Massachusetts); Apr 21, 2024.

See more usage examples of elliptic in Vocabulary.com’s dictionary.

A THOUGHT FOR TODAY:

I don't need time. What I need is a deadline. -Duke Ellington, jazz pianist, composer, and conductor (29 Apr 1899-1974)

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