Ex-Word of the Day: Toplinear

In her diligent book of epistemology, Evidence and Inquiry (1993), Susan Haack steers her bark between the twin cliffs of Foundationalism and Coherentism, before christening her own proposed juste milieu with the,  alas, ungainly name of :

Foundherentism

There was something comical about the coinage which I could not quite put my finger on.

Then this morning, happening to dip into one of Serge Lang’s textbooks on Differential Geometry, discussing topological vector spaces[**], I re-encountered his own stillborn coinage:

“… a Toplinear isomorphism, referring to the topology  and the linearity”

It is gauche in much the same way.

Neither term has much caught on, outside the readership-circle of its coiner.


[**  A TVS is a uniform structure on a linear space.]