What's Up With Fnoffles?

Misnomers mislead people into thinking the answer to Shakespeare's "What's in a name?" is really in the name. As for the case of shooting star, it is not in fact a star but a meteor. However it almost always loses its aesthetic value when science comes in redefining things. Nevertheless it is as harmless as it gets when you talk about aesthetics, at least for me.

As of today, when you search Google for no fnoffle glorfs itself there is exactly one unfiltered result. The sentence was extracted from Torkel Franzén's book Gödel's Theorem: An Incomplete Guide to Its Use and Abuse. The book was published in 2005 but the topic only came to my awareness this past four months. And what was I doing the past four months? I was book-hunting to make my time on unofficial leave worthwhile, at least for my taste.

Back to misnomers, I named this blog that way for the same reason I can name it another way or another cool way. Franzén used the words fnoffle and glorf to mean an arbitrary object and action. For illustration, fnoffle can mean an integer and to glorf can mean to succeed. That is, "No fnoffle glorfs itself" means "No integer succeeds itself". This was used in the presentation of the Peano axioms. Arbitrariness is a very useful concept in mathematics and in life and in blogs, at least for my whims.

The title is every bit a misnomer, anybody can mistake it with a weird site of narcissistic contemplation because it represents randomness but the naming wasn't at all. Although that explanation may not have gone too well for you, I'm still delighted I have to make one.