All Shapes and Sizes

I have always preferred the word "oblong" to its tediously geometric sounding alter-ego: "rectangle." An oblong is obviously more mysterious, somehow opaque. You might get lost in an oblong, not knowing where its slide-rule measurements will take you. A rectangle, on the other hand, just seems like a gloomy and unnecessarily stretched-out quadrilateral that a boring mathematician has drawn on graph paper with his retractable pencil. Similarly, I feel that "lozenge" seems like an almost exclusively European shape, perhaps a former KGB agent in the world of set-square spies.

Comments

[mike]

Oblong. Oblo-o-ong. Very woody, that. Rectangle. Dreadfully tinny.

[Dom]

All oblongs are rectangles, but not all rectangles are oblongs. Squares, eg, are rectangles.