Come on and stay
Ten years ago today, I was probably sitting in a math class on the second floor of Reeds Brook Middle School, and I was probably waiting for the weekend to arrive as quickly as possible. At the right side of the room, I would have looked over to see a bright, young woman jotting down notes and drawing diagrams of geometric shapes. And I’d bet money that there were at least two rhombus shapes on the whiteboard.
My recollection of an 8th grade math class isn’t that amazing. But on October 25, 1996, somebody must have mentioned rhombuses. Or they might have mentioned rhombi. On October 25, 1996, the Rhombuses and Thesauruses Fan Club was founded.
In the heat of the 1996 election campaign, I sat alongside a Latin-loving classmate and argued about the correct pluralization of the word rhombus. Over the next years, we’d add other -us words to the growing fire of our debate: thesauruses, campuses… and later we would add -a words such as antenna and agenda. I think we’d both admit now that the argument grew out of hand and caused more tension than we had hoped, but I also think it helped us both with time.
Why does a seemingly insignificant disagreement matter? Just look at what’s happened since then. If I recall correctly, the RTFC site was the first public Web site I ever created, and it would function as a platform for me to test out new Web technologies (JavaScript, Java scrollers, marquees, and more) alongside its opposition site of the International Society of Rhombi and Thesauri (ISRT), both hosted on Geocities (Athens/Olympus/4201, to be exact). It also honed our debate skills. But most of all, it encouraged creativity. With the myriad of song parodies I did for the club in the 90s, I think it’s pretty obvious that I was more creative then than I am now (I hope that changes soon, though).
The presidents have gone their separate ways now. Laura will be able to use her intelligence and wonderful debate skills throughout and after law school and I’m sitting on top of a to-be-brainstormed world of possibilites at Semsym. I think we’ve done well, even if we still disagree about those pluralizations.
Sometimes I miss those days, though.
