Appox* (for Approx*)

Today is a good day for cutting things off. Whereas March 14 is the official "Pi Day" (314 being the first three digits in the never-ending number known as pi), it appears that July 22 is "Pi Approximation Day," since the fraction 22/7 is commonly considered close enough. You might dream of owning two homes, but one with pi as the street address would be a real nightmare ... a pox, so to say, on both your houses! And speaking of houses, here's a little circumference joke for you, which brought down the house recently when my nephew told it to us. It's from a book containing egregiously absurd examples of metaphor and analogy in high school essays and it goes like this: "Sir Francis Drake circumcised the world with a 100-foot clipper." You could clip approximately 100 feet off of pi and still have a long way to go. There were four cases of today's typo discovered in OhioLINK, and 291 in WorldCat.

("Thousand digits of pi," red numerals on a graduated grey background, 19 March 2012, from Wikimedia Commons.)

Carol Reid