The oval is dead. Yes, you heard me right - the oval is no longer. And if you think that’s bad, the diamond’s dead, too. I first suspected they’d been running with the wrong crowd and had come to the typical tragic ending. Ended up, however, they were victims of a certain group’s desperate need to do something. 

My wife, a very reliable source and highly esteemed preschool teacher, told me the sad news just the other day. Her job is to know and love everything there is to know about shapes (and storytime). “What’s this, kids?” “Oball…(in unison)”

So you can imagine the gasps throughout the preschool halls the morning the moms arrived, kids in tow, and announced how if their child were to mark ”oval” for its corresponding shape on the kindergarten entrance exam, they’d wind up infinitely wrong, and perhaps a year older than their graduating class. Nope - now it’s called an ellipse. And the diamond, a rhombus.

The hard, cold imaginary truth of the matter is that this is what happens when you get a bunch of shape experts in the same room together. Realizing the shape field has experienced next to zero major achievements since King Tut’s day, when the wheel was dubbed the circle, and, therefore, their paychecks might be in danger, they did what any normal shape experts would do: they held a convention.

Someone needed to invent a need for change - and fast. Otherwise, what in the world were they getting paid for? No, seriously, what?   

 Since all the good shapes were taken, the assembly of minds unamiously agreed that the only real route to take was to rename a couple well-known ones. If anything, this would at least confuse the general public, not to mention the up and coming kindergartners, long enough to secure their jobs for the next few years (and, fingers crossed, open the opportunity for a nice Time Magazine write-up). Plus, the ellipse and rhombus sound a heck of a lot smarter than an oval or a dumb old diamond.

Well, this is all fine and well, I guess. A shape expert’s gotta make a living, too. But it dawned on me that I suddenly stood outside the with-it crowd. I no longer knew my shapes. I was an oval living in an ellipse generation. And, chances were, from old habit, I’ll still go on calling an oval an oval, only to be met, no doubt, by snickers and secretive giggles from those young lads in the know. I will be labeled with the folks who either can’t help or insist on calling a movie a picture show, or an automobile a horseless carriage.       

Worse yet, what about cards?! The Queen of diamonds is now the Queen of rhombuses (or rhombi; whatever its plural form). It’s dreadful; we are witnessing the extinction of those who call a spade a spade! This here was too much. I sat down, took some deep breathes. My head swam with the sense of a world spun out of control. Suddenly even my neighborhood felt strangely unfamiliar, like I’d slipped into a deep coma and woken up on Mars. I panicked, fearing for the triangle’s life, then the circle’s. Where does the terrible momentum of shape renaming stop? And, what about America’s votes on the matter? Does democracy only reach so far?

 Soon they’ll probably change my name. So, to avoid forever getting stuck with something ridiculous, I must get a jump on these guys. For now on, I declare my name to officially be Eoj (which is Joe spelled backwards) Oval (in memory of) Diamond (also, in memory of), Sr. (incase there’s ever a junior).   

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