Dodecagon

Use in the book

The Dodecagons first appear among those reached by the spreading fashion for paint. Their adoption marks the invention's ascent through the social scale: conservative Pentagons hesitate, Dodecagons follow, and finally almost all the nobility participate. The name provides a precise rung in a hierarchy otherwise described through broad classes. Fashion can cross those rungs faster than hereditary development can.

In §1023 the Dodecagon becomes an identity that can be counterfeited. A low Isosceles paints himself with twelve colours and imitates the voice of a higher-class man. The scheme substitutes a counted visual sign for a counted bodily fact. Because people have grown accustomed to reading colour, the impostor can exploit their trust in the sign while leaving his underlying geometry unchanged. The episode reveals a general vulnerability in any social system whose rank is recognized through an external code.

The narration must nevertheless be read with caution. It describes the victim as an orphan daughter of a noble Polygon, gives the deception many fortunate accidents, and reproaches her relatives for failing to take precautions. The young woman's suicide becomes the emotional pivot in a campaign against the Colour Bill. She is scarcely permitted an independent voice; her suffering is turned into an argument about the security of all marriages. The ruler's subsequent appeal enlarges one catastrophe into the prospect of universal domestic ruin.

Abbott places the story immediately after a recommendation that statesmen sometimes originate sensational incidents. That placement undermines the innocence of its political circulation without establishing its factual falsity. A lexicon should preserve both levels: within the reported event the Dodecagon is a false identity, and within the larger history the event's evidentiary status is qualified by uncertainty and political usefulness.

The word's later appearance in §1223 is quieter. A Dodecagon, like a Hexagon, is less rigorous about a wife's remote pedigree than an aspiring lower-class man. The real twelve-sided noble can take liberties with inherited status that the impostor seeks through paint. Together the passages show rank operating as visible form, fashionable sign, matrimonial advantage, and narratively manufactured fear.

Places to read

1. §82“even the Dodecagons infected”
2. §1023“the twelve colours of a Dodecagon”
3. §1023“for the story varies”
4. §1023“a string of lucky accidents”
5. §1223“a Hexagon or Dodecagon”

In this edition

The Note on the Text states that Abbott's revised second edition corrected Dodecahedron to Dodecagon in §§10 and 1223456. Modern note 98 explains the colour-count imposture. The correction belongs to Abbott's revision; the explanation belongs to the present editor.

Dodecagon

A twelve-sided plane polygon and therefore a noble rank in Flatland. The impostor copies its twelve-colour signal without acquiring twelve actual sides. Printed form: Dodecagon (§ 1023). See Dodecagon.

Fatuity

Foolishness or lack of judgment. The narrator blames the bride’s relatives for allowing the fraudulent marriage to proceed. Printed form: fatuity (§ 1023). See Dodecagon.

a second Nature (contextual phrase)

Exact wording: “a second Nature” (§923).

An acquired habit becomes second nature when it seems as immediate as an original disposition. Flatland gives the idiom constitutional force. Colour recognition has changed what ordinary people can do, so the reformers argue that legal distinctions should change too. The capitalized Nature brings the new practice into competition with the authority constantly invoked for inherited rank. The phrase does not mean that painting literally alters the number of anyone’s sides. It means that a cultural invention can transform the practical consequences of those sides. This distinction is crucial: the new code makes competence more widely available while remaining capable of imitation. Its political strength and its vulnerability arise from the same detachment of visible signs from bodily form.

Related: Colour; Reform and equality; Dodecagon.