FE Meme
Around the World, Not Across
#292: You go around the world, not across it, so the everyday phrase itself admits a flat enclosed layout rather than a ball.
The Meme
Text meme contrasting "around the world" versus "across the world" as flat-Earth wordplay on idiomatic English.
Why It Spreads
Idiom hacking feels clever without math: if people already say around the world, promoters repackage the phrase as hidden flat-disk testimony versus across the world. The contrast sounds like linguistic proof that everyday English encodes enclosed geography.
What It Gets Wrong
The text meme contrasting "around the world" with "across the world" treats English idiom as topography, implying everyday phrasing selects a flat enclosed layout over a ball. Circumnavigation closes loops on a convex body: equatorial circumference ~40075 km, polar meridian half-circumference ~20004 km, and GNSS tracks on round-the-world flights follow great circles on the WGS84 ellipsoid. Dictionary games do not change opposite seasons, eclipse geometry, or southern airline schedules that flat chords mis-predict while spherical geodesics fit. TestTheGlobe's Flights Only Make Sense On A Flat Map and TestTheGlobe's Flight Path Comparison walk through the observations and predictions this image skips.
The Debunk
The text meme contrasting "around the world" with "across the world" treats English idiom as topography. Circumnavigation closes loops on a convex body: equatorial circumference ~40075 km, polar meridian half-circumference ~20004 km, and GNSS tracks on round-the-world flights follow great circles on the WGS84 ellipsoid.
- Wordplay is not cartography; TestTheGlobe's Flights Only Make Sense On A Flat Map explains why spherical routes look strange on flat maps but minimize real distance.
- TestTheGlobe's Flight Path Comparison plots circumnavigation-style paths on the ellipsoid idioms loosely describe.
- Twenty-four one-hour longitudinal bands follow rotation on a convex body; TestTheGlobe's Time Zones Are Fake addresses claims that time zones are staged.
- Projection stretching distorts path appearance; TestTheGlobe's Map Distortion Does Not Matter separates Mercator art from surveyed topology.