a complete 360

[Joseph McCollum]

Then the meaning of "making a complete 360," for politicians, should be
"to stop, make motions as though one is changing philosophy/policy, and
proceed in the original direction."  This term might describe the
Ashcroft deliberations after all.

National Review once claimed that the meaning of the word "factoid" ought
to be "something that resembles a fact, but isn't."  I don't think it
specifically mentioned CNN.  For instance, "raising the minimum wage
helps the poor" is a factoid.

A spheroid is a malformed sphere (such as a football), a cuboid is a
malformed cube, etc., all of any size.  CNN means "factoid" as "a fact
small enough that it may be displayed on a TV screen during the break to
commercial."

In analytic geometry, we have the unfortunate term "ellipsoid."  Rather
than being a malformed ellipse, the term indicates an ellipse of 3 or
more dimensions.  A better term would have been "hyperellipse," because
we have the terms "hypercube" and "hypersphere" indicate a cube or sphere
of 4 or more dimensions.  There is also the term "hyperboloid," meaning a
hyperbola extended to at least a third dimension.  I suppose
"hyper-hyperbola" would have an unpleasant echo.  The last of the conic
sections (the others being circle, ellipse, and hyperbola) is the
parabola.  Its 3-dimensional analog is called the "paraboloid."  Again, a
better term would have been "hyperparabola."  I have never heard a
hypersphere called a circloid.