Oblong,
A Lost Word
by George W. Hervey (New York)
The Royal Arch
Mason - Fall 1980
Many amateur mathematicians who try
to maintain dutiful interest in elementary geometry probably
wonder why the supposedly common word "oblong" meets very little
use in ordinary English conversation. Ask visitors separately
to identify the shape exemplified by a certain picture hanging on
one's living room wall. Quite frequently comes the response,
"Well, that is not a square though definitely rectangular. " A
formal report on the reasons therefor has undergone
protracted delay. Facts were missing about whether Americans
during some bygone period had been familiar with this neglected
yet logically acceptable term. After eventually querying the
well known author James R. Case, the needed preliminary
information began to unfold.
Past Geographical
Distinction
There was indeed a unique precedent
- geographical. A trustworthy account appears in George
Lounsbury Rockwell's History of Ridgefield, Connecticut (1927).
Once the British took over New Netherlands from the Dutch in
1664, according to his research an existing boundary dispute
intensified between Connecticut and the newly named New
York. Flaring and subsiding at irregular intervals, the matter
never achieved complete resolution until the 1880-81
congressional session following positive action by the two
state legislatures concerned. Tacit in the agreements, a
secondary feature attracts attention because citizens in the
sparsely settled colonial provinces learned back in 1731 that
under mixed amicable and protesting circumstances New York had
exchanged Greenwich, Stamford, and an additional small area
for a strip a little to the west, approximately two miles wide
and fifty-three miles long. Beginning early in the
eighteenth century, The Oblong drew Quaker visitors from near
and far locales. They came on invitation to attend annual
meetings typically lasting ten days. Adds Case, "The region has
changed; the very few who know the story employ the
old designation very sparingly." So, despite the former
widespread recognition the local disuse integrates with like
discernible omissions in formal educational
training.
Euclid's Prejudice
Before the demand for
public schools increased enough to warrant their
large-scale establishment in the United States
numerous affluent fathers sent away promising sons, mainly at
age fourteen years, to reputable academies or institutes. All
such maintained higher quality curricula than did the
more prevalent boarding schools. Most are long gone; some
prominent survivors prepare their students for entering leading
universities. From the outset all the old-time headmasters of
course recognized mathematics to be both an art and a science. At
mid-nineteenth century the available printed material
for complementing classroom instruction patterned on Elements
of Geometry and Trigonometry, by A.N. Legendre, a French work
favored in Europe. Some American critics thought
the adaptations laid too much stress on how, not enough on
why. An outright domestic edition bearing the same title and
author's name, published in New York, 1864, represented
an earnest effort to overcome the imbalance. Charles
Davies, a Columbia College professor, the credited revisionist,
enlarged the descriptive content and eliminated
unduly complicated diagrammatic expositions. Altogether the
changed comparative emphases still endure to a possibly
unrealized extent although the major constituent subjects
no longer receive practical coverage in a single book. With
respect to plane geometry, a little digging in Sir Thomas L.
Heath's three-volume Euclid's Elements, Translation and
Commentary, Second Edition, New York, 1925, brings to light a
remarkable troth. The famed Greek scholar (circa 300B.C.)
defined an oblong as "that which is right-angled and not
equilateral," but then avoided perpetuating the already well
known word in the included demonstrations. Intentional or not,
modem text writers resist the urge to undermine the consequent
deeply rooted custom by calling a spade a spade. An
erudite individual's ability to answer "oblong" if interrogated a
second time merely points up the noun's slippage from
routine vocabularies. Sometimes a rarely detected exception
even combines with misuse. For example, a well-intentioned
commercial producer who tries to relate the two dimensional
figure to a pasteboard box containing a purchasable grocery item
goes astray by supplying three measurements. Here an alert
reader might interject that technical lapses seem
inconsequential considered beside oblong's independent,
free and easy adjectival connotations. Unsupported by
requisite data, the suggestion leaves room for further
observation concerning the western world at large. Apparently a
visitor can spend months in Britain, Canada, or U.S.A. without
noticing a single application.
Oblong Square
Citable
instances onward from 1400 A.D. evidently conformed to much older
origins. Striving at interpretive consistency, the redoubtable
Dr. Samuel Johnson (1709-1784) in Dictionary of the English
Language gave priority to the concise meaning "longer
than broad." Among past renowned writers at least a few never
hesitated to choose oblong for conveying the same or a closely
similar understanding. Benjamin Franklin's friend
Voltaire (1694-1778) aptly serves illustration. A lifelong
inclination toward logical concepts enabled him to say in
Philosophic Transactions: "There is nothing immutable
but geometry; all things else undergo incessant variation."
Equally adept at pushing rigor aside for needed qualitative
phraseology, the revered Frenchman narrated in The Man
of Forty Crowns: "You have proposed to furnish the houses in
town with what water they want, to deliver us at length from the
shame and ridicule of hearing water cried about the streets,
and of seeing women inclosed within an oblong hoop carrying two
[filled] pails, both together of [some] thirty pounds
weight up to a fourth story." By choosing oblong to modify
hoop Voltaire barred future puzzlement over alternative
expressions that hung on into the nineteenth century's first
half. Sir Walter Scott (1771-1832) contributed unwittingly
to the interpretive difficulties. Writing in stride the novel
Waverly, the versatile Edinburgh native saw nothing abstruse
connected with mentally recalling Doune Castle: "It was in form
an oblong square, of size sufficient to maintain a large court
at the centre. The towers at each angle of the square rose higher
than the walls of the building." Foreign to mathematical
terminology, the two stressed portions evolved from a grass-roots
inception to colloquial respectability two centuries or more
before Scott attained literary prominence. Until someone
offers persuasive different information an inquirer can
justifiably infer custom dictated "oblong square" to
stand somewhat indefinitely for "an oblong, possessing certain
intrinsic properties borne also by a square." "Each angle of the
square" reaffirmed the partial mutuality through recognizing
both parallelograms contain right angles at the corners; the
idiom defies complete conversion to modern
vernacular. Unvoiced, both added implications contemporary
hearers readily grasped. Best interpreted, the very necessity for
the elaborations adduces a too easily overlooked lesson.
Contrary ill-advised efforts to shorten or to simplify occasional
strangely sounding expressions indited long ago by master
craftsmen arc destined to end
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