Monday, February 27, 2012

My Big Fat Greek Math Book

One of our favorite movies as of late has been "My Big Fat Greek Wedding."  We have probably seen it about eight times and it just gets funnier every time we watch it. 

 My favorite character is the father of the bride, Gus, played by Michael Constantine, who delivers everyone one of his lines perfectly.  Some of his famous lines are about him taking any word and telling how it is from a Greek origin. 
So we are reading along in Dancer's math book and come to these few lines which I read just as Gus would have said them.  "The word polygon is formed from the Greek roots poly, which means, "more than one" or "many," and gonon, which means "angle."  Thus polygon literally means "more than one angle."  We were just rolling.  After a few moments we compose ourselves and move on. 
Another of Gus' great wisdom is that there are two kinds of people in the world, Greeks and those who wish they were Greeks.  A little further on on the page there are two diagrams much like the ones below.

So we decided, again while laughing, that polygons are Greek and all other shapes wish they were Greek.  I highly doubt that Dancer will ever forget what a polygon is.

1 comment:

jugglingpaynes said...

Even though my dad is Spanish, he reminds me so much of the father in this movie. When he keeps saying how all words come from Greek, it's like hearing my dad claiming all words are the same in Spanish, you just add an "o" at the end. If only it were that simple!

Peace and Laughter!