Regularity

Use in the book

Section 723 belatedly announces the assumption underlying the earlier descriptions. One can recognise a person from a single angle only if that part reliably represents the whole. The reader has already accepted demonstrations built upon this expectation. Disclosing it late mimics the way a society can treat its own classificatory premises as obvious until an excluded case forces them into view.

Regularity provides convenience. Bodies can be anticipated, doorways used, crowds negotiated and gatherings planned. Abbott gives those needs enough plausibility that the argument cannot be dismissed as pure absurdity. The satire begins when convenience becomes a sufficient account of a person's right to exist, and when a standard useful for recognition is made a verdict on conduct.

The word equality produces a particular irony. Equality within one figure sustains inequality between figures. The narrator can praise equal sides as the foundation of civilisation while accepting hereditary subordination and the starvation of the lowest classes. The geometry has no democratic implication unless an interpreter supplies one; the society instead uses internal sameness to stabilise external rank.

Certification reveals that the norm is institutional as well as bodily. The newborn Equilateral is examined by a board, the ambitious lineage requires approved marriages, and deviations receive medical intervention. At several points regularity can be produced or acknowledged through official action. It is not simply a self-announcing essence. The state has a continuing role in deciding which apparent exceptions can be repaired, incorporated or removed.

The different standard for Isosceles makes the universal language especially suspect. They fail the all-sides-equal test used to diminish their humanity in §323, yet satisfy a two-sides-equal rule in §723. This is not an argument that every geometrical regularity is arbitrary. It is evidence that the narrator's application of the prestigious term responds to the needs of an existing taxonomy.

A reader should therefore distinguish three propositions: regular figures support efficient inference; a society may reasonably manage collision risks; and bodily nonconformity proves moral guilt. The first is the narrative's mathematical premise, the second concerns practical arrangements, and the third is the unjustified transformation on which persecution depends. The text's repeated therefore cannot make them equivalent.

Places to read

1. §723“every human being in Flatland is a Regular Figure”
2. §723“of regular construction”
3. §723“Regularity, or Equality of Angles”
4. §723“the whole of the social life in Flatland”
5. §723“Regularity of conformation”
6. §723“the fixed margin of deviation”

In this edition

Notes 75–762 distinguish the mathematical definition and the narrative's use of a single angle as evidence. The claim that equal sides alone guarantee every angle is not adopted here as a general theorem about arbitrary polygons. The article follows the fiction's stipulated regular classes while preserving the mathematical qualification supplied by the edition.

Certifiable

Capable of receiving official certification as equal-sided. The apparently mathematical fact must be ratified by an institution before it creates social rights; the word stresses that birth alone does not complete admission to a superior class. Printed form: certifiable (§ 323). See Regularity.

Configuration · § 5

A figure’s bodily shape or disposition of sides and angles. In the discussion of recognition it names what an observer must discover; the same word’s later elevation into doctrine depends on treating this visible arrangement as the cause of character. Printed form: configuration (§ 523). See Regularity.

Intercourse

Ordinary social communication and dealings, without a specifically sexual sense here. The narrator claims that irregular bodies would make intercourse perilous or impossible, treating the convenience of familiar interaction as a justification for compulsory bodily conformity. Printed form: intercourse (§ 723). See Regularity.

Patent · § 7

Plainly evident or open to observation. By declaring the consequences of irregularity patent to Spaceland readers, the Square presses his assumptions into the form of common knowledge rather than demonstrating that they warrant the policies he supports. Printed form: patent (§ 723). See Regularity.

Sanitary and Social Board

The examining authority that decides whether a child born to Isosceles parents qualifies for the Equilateral class. Its compound title treats social rank as a matter of bodily health and makes the state the arbiter of legitimate improvement. Printed form: Sanitary and Social Board (§ 323). See Regularity.

The interests of the Greater Number (contextual phrase)

“the interests of the Greater Number” (§ 723)

The phrase makes numerical predominance a warrant for the suffering of a minority. It follows the reformers’ account of the Irregular’s exclusion from family, marriage, meaningful work, and ordinary trust. Rather than refuting that account, the narrator answers that the majority requires such a life to be hard. Greater Number consequently changes the question from whether the treatment is just to whether accepted arrangements should be inconvenienced. The subsequent examples include doors, theatre admission, military service, and commercial credit, all organised around predictable bodies. The supplied editorial note identifies the language of utilitarianism; the passage’s particular distortion lies in treating existing conveniences as decisive while excluding the minority’s welfare from serious comparison. A claim about general benefit licenses very particular harms. See Irregularity, Regularity, and Doors and houses.