Excerpt

Nothingology —
Flying to Nowhere

'Nothing', it has been said, 'is an awe-inspiring yet essentially undigested concept, highly esteemed by writers of a mystical or existentialist tendency, but by most others regarded with anxiety, nausea, and panic.'Nobody seems to know how to handle it and perplexingly diverse conceptions of it exist in different subjects.Just take a look at the entry for 'nothing' in any good dictionary and you will find a host of perplexing synonyms: nil, none, nowt, nulliform, nullity — there is a nothing for every occasion. There are noughts of all sorts to zero-in on, from zero points to zero hours, ciphers to nulliverses.There are concepts that are vacuous, places that are evacuated, and voids of all shapes and sizes. On the more human side, there are nihilists, nihilianists, nihilarians, nihilagents, nothingarians, nullifideans, nullibists,nonentities and nobodies. Every walk of life seems to have its own personification of nothing. Even the financial pages of my newspaper tell me that 'zeros'are an increasingly attractive source of income.

Some zeros seem positively obscure, almost circumlocutory. Tennis can't bring itself to use so blunt a thing as the word 'nil' or 'nothing' or 'zero' to record no score. Instead, it retains the antique term 'love', which has reached us rather unromantically from l'oeuf, the French for an egg which represented the round 0 shape of the zero symbol.Likewise, we still find the use of the term 'love' meaning 'nothing' as when saying you are playing for love (rather than money), hence the distinction of being a true 'amateur', or the statement that one would not