Droste effect
n.— «At my grocery store I could only find three examples: Land O’Lakes Butter, Morton Salt and Cracker Jacks. These packages each include a picture of the package itself and are often cited by writers discussing such pop-math-arcana as recursion, strange loops, self-similarity, and fractals. This particular phenomenon, known as the “Droste effect,” is named after a 1904 package of Droste brand cocoa.» —“Droste Effect Packaging” box vox Apr. 12, 2008. (source: Double-Tongued Dictionary)
Further reading
A North Carolina listener says that when he was a boy and asked for something at a store that his father didn’t want to buy, his dad would...
From ancient Greece comes this example of an indefinite hyperbolic numeral such as umpteen, zillion, and fifty-eleven: psammakosioi. Aristophanes...
Following up on our conversation about words like elderly and senior citizen, a listener in Albuquerque, New Mexico, suggests the term seasoned...
A young caller from Austin, Texas, wonders: Why do we say things like go to the store or go to the park, but leave out the word the when we say go...
A Dallas-area police officer is curious about low sick, a term which he and his fellow officers use to describe someone dangerously ill. Sometimes...
The phrase salt of the earth describes someone who is essential and pure of heart, a reference to the biblical Sermon on the Mount. To salt the earth...
You must log in to post a comment.