Haggard Hawks 67

Hyperbolic paraboloids and misspelled Scandinavians

MOST POPULAR THIS WEEK

SHAPE OR FORM

 

Most popular on HH this week was the fact that the shape of a Pringle crisp (or chip, should you be so inclined) is a hyperbolic paraboloid. 

 

There’ll no doubt be lots of interesting facts about paraboloids, but mathematics isn’t the HH game BECAUSE MATHS. But we can at least tell you a little bit more about those two words.

 

The adjective hyperbolic relates to a hyperbola, which our trusty dictionary defines as “a plane curve having two branches formed by the intersection of a plane with both halves of a right circular cone at an angle parallel to the axis of the cone.” Yeah, one of those. Hyperbola, in turn, comes from the Greek for “excess”—which makes it an etymological sibling of hyperbole, the rhetorical term for exaggeration. 

 

A paraboloid meanwhile is “a geometric surface whose sections parallel to two coordinate planes are parabolic, and whose sections parallel to the third plane are either elliptical or hyperbolic.” Aye, that thing, yeah.

 

Words like parabola, parabolic and paraboloid all come from a Greek word meaning “application”, “juxtaposition”, or literally a “throwing beside”. Mathematically, as the Oxford English Dictionary explains, the name was given to curves of this type by a third century BC mathematician named Apollonius of Perga, who chose it as it “referred to the fact that a rectangle bounded by the abscissa and the latus rectum has an area equal to that of a square on the ordinate, without either excess or deficiency”. But of course.

 

Etymologically, all of that makes parabola is a none-too-distant cousin of parable—a story in which a secondary, less direct meaning or interpretation is “juxtaposed” beside another more overt one. 

 

Elsewhere this week we found out:

 

  • someone who does nothing is a nihilagent
  • a moke is a thick fog or mist
  • mogigraphia is writer’s cramp...
  • ...while mogigraphy is cramped handwriting
  • and backlogs were originally—well, logs.

POPULAR THIS WEEK

NORDIC TALKING

 

The fact that the name Scandinavia began life as a spelling error propagated by Pliny the Elder proved popular over on the HH Instagram page this week: Scandinavia was originally Scadinavia, but Pliny (seemingly mistakenly) added a second N in the first century AD. The popularity and influence of his writing in the centuries that followed only served to make the error more widespread, and eventually the dual-N spelling became the norm.

 

Two things, then. First of all—the word Scandinavia itself? It comes from Skáney, the Old Norse name for an ancient region of southern Sweden. And secondly—are there any other words that have missteps and mistakes in their histories? Well, yes, there are. Quite a number of them, in fact.

 

The word expediate, for instance, meaning “to hasten”, is thought to have emerged in the early 1600s when the word expedite was misspelled in an essay by the English statesman Sir Edwin Sandys. The two Ls in syllabus should really be Ts, as the word is actually a misreading of the Ancient Greek sittybos, meaning “table of contents”.

 

As we’ve found out on HH before, sneeze was originally spelled fnese before that initial F was misinterpreted as a long S, ſ, in the fifteenth century. And a single pea was originally called a pease, but because it sounds like a plural, a misguided singular form, pea, developed in the 1600s and has remained in use ever since. 

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AND FINALLY...

ANAGRAMS 33

 

Four more tricky anagrams to round things off this week: each of the words below can be rearranged to spell another much more familiar dictionary word. What are they? 

 

EMICATED

PREDATED

STRIATED

VIOLATED

 

Last week’s solution:

PARTIED, TRAUMAS, ACERBIC, ANYMORE

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