Word of the day: cingulum

Gotta love our international testing group members who use English as a second language. They logged bugs about a “cingulum” when everybody locally used “gap”. This was a problem where a paragraph break on a web page caused an object to be pushed down that was supposed to be aligned at the top of the window. I’m intrigued by the worldview difference expressed in the two words: Cingulum identifies the problem as a marking while gap points to the absence of something. I’m probably making much of something that is just a translation accident. In art you are trained to think in terms of positive and negative space. Cingulum describes the empty space in positive terms, as if it is part of the design. The use of the negative word gap reinforces that it is the problem.