Gazinta

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Mary-Kate from Columbus, Ohio.

Well, hi, Mary-Kate. Welcome to the show.

Hi, Mary-Kate.

Hi.

How can we help?

All right, so I work with a bunch of former math teachers, and we need help with a math term.

Oh, you weren’t going to say a math problem, thank goodness.

No, I was going to say math on the radio does not go well.

No, we’ve got those covered.

Okay, good, good, good, okay.

But a math term.

Okay, math term.

Do tell.

All right.

All right, you know the long division sign that looks like a 7 kind of turned on its side? It’s like a little house, and a quotient goes on top?

Oh, it’s ringing a vague bell, yeah.

It’s curved on the left and flat.

Sometimes it’s curved, sometimes it’s straight, right?

Yep, that’s it.

It’s kind of like a diagonal half of a rectangle.

Right.

Okay.

So we’ve got a name for it, but we know it’s not the real name.

Oh, really? What is it?

Well, a couple editors found the name Gazinta.

Mm—

And they didn’t get the joke right away, and the name has stuck around here.

Oh, that’s great.

They didn’t get the joke right away.

That’s even better.

And how do they spell it?

I would guess G-A-Z-I-N-T-A.

Yeah, sometimes it’s G-O-Z-I-N-T-A.

But you want to tell us the joke?

It’s something like when you read the sign out loud, it would say 4-Gazinta-28-7.

Right, exactly.

It’s gazenta, so it’s these words goes into, mashed together, right?

Okay, so you’re in a kind of work where you need to refer to this term for long division.

Did they still do long division?

I thought they got calculated.

They figured it all out.

There’s none of it left to be done anymore.

It’s all finished.

Martha, is it just as simple as long division symbol?

I think it’s long division symbol or division bracket is the only other one I’ve seen.

Really hyper-boring.

Yeah, Gazinta.

Maybe if you capitalized the G in Gazinta, what about that?

Then it would look more official.

I think it would make everyone smile anyway.

I think it would, too.

And you could tell them that Gazinta was some 15th century mathematician.

Yeah, Italian.

Yeah, Italian, who discovered the…

Just tell them Galileo made it.

Well, the problem with this is that it’s actually kind of relatively a new piece of punctuation, right? A new bit of topography, right? New-ish. New math. I don’t know.

I mean, it’s not like, it seems so old fashioned to me. Yeah, it does to me too.

The thing is when it started, it actually was two separate pieces. It was a parentheses on the left, the vertical thing, and then a flat line across the top. I’m going to mispronounce this, but it’s a vinculum.

Vinculum. Yeah. It’s a great Scrabble word, by the way. V-I-N-C-U-L-U-M.

And that’s the horizontal part. It’s a Latin word that means something that connects other things.

Right, but you’re no better off if you say the parenthesis plus a vinculum than you are.

It’s a long division symbol.

That’s the standard term in the textbooks.

Yeah, or division bracket.

That’s a little shorter.

A little shorter.

But I think, are you in a position where you can make the policy and tell them it’s a gazenta?

You know, if you’re saying that’s how it appears in the textbooks, we could probably have a say in that.

The gazenta doesn’t appear in the textbooks usually.

But the long division symbol is what it’s called in the textbooks.

That actual three-word phrase, long division symbol, really boring.

Oh, it’s a little disappointing.

English is better than that.

English can do better.

Come on, English.

That’s right.

Fix it.

Let’s see.

LDS.

No, that one.

No, no.

Mary-Kate, if we hear from our listeners that there’s something even hotter than Gazenta for this particular symbol, we’ll let you know, all right?

Great.

Thanks so much.

Sure.

Okay.

Thank you.

Thanks.

Bye-bye.

Bye.

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