All my life’s a circle/sunrise and sundown/the moon rose through the night time/till the daybreak comes around/all my life’s a circle/but I can’t tell you why/the seasons spinning round again/the years go rolling by...

With permission, those are the opening lines to a song called Circles sung by a band of the early Seventies called The New Seekers. Assisted by a simple, but haunting melody, the song reminds us of the cyclic nature of things. It is also but one of hundreds of songs that use the ‘circle’ as a similar metaphor.

The great, one-and-only Joni Mitchell in a metaphoric variation in The Circle Game has this: “And the seasons they go round and round/and the painted ponies go up and down/we’re captive on the carousel of time/we can’t return/we can only look behind/from where we came/and go round and round and round/in the circle game.”

As a friend of mine pointed out recently, in our universe of many shapes, the circle is the most central and primary.

“We humans, too, prefer it and have conditioned ourselves to react cyclically to things. Fashion, for instance. It circles in and circles out. It does the rounds, everybody jumps on the fashion bandwagon for a brief while until another fad appears. Then everybody jumps off and starts another circle afresh.”

That is true. I recall a time in my teenage years when bell-bottom trousers were so popular I could have wagered that they were here to stay. Especially after wearing drainpipes that strangulated every leg muscle and made stretching and running well nigh impossible. Sadly, the bell-bottom experienced no such fashion immortality. In a few years it was gone and tight trousers were back in.

Hairstyles

Similarly, hairstyles have come, gone, reappeared and disappeared once more. Baroque women preferred partings down the middle. (This was also the period of the hurluberlu coiffure, a hairstyle that required a mop of downward-pointing curls at the back and the neck); Victorian women smoothed their hair with oils or curled the hair into long and short ringlets. The Roaring Twenties witnessed short, bobbed, waved hairdos that signalled growing independence and a free-spirit. Men went from powdered white wigs, mutton chop sideburns and whiskers to centre partings slicked down with brilliantine or perfumed oil. By the Sixties the hippie era was bringing about a blending or blurring of styles. Men of that period literally let their hair down.

Writing, too, has followed this cyclic trend. Back in early times, when words were aplenty but writing materials like parchment, papyrus were scarce, scribes were required to employ abbreviations and contractions so that an entire account may be told in the limited space available. An abbreviation, as we all know is a shortened form of a word or phrase. It may shorten a word by any method. A contraction, on the other hand, reduces the size of a word by ‘drawing its parts together’. Certain syllables and letters may be omitted for this purpose. Beowulf, one of the earliest English poems, uses many abbreviations (& for and, and y for since).

During the time of the Roman empire, in 63 BC, Marcus Tullius Tiro, Cicero’s amanuensis (or scribe, employed to take notes) developed his own sigla (a form of shorthand with symbols) which became very popular at that time. In my day, many centuries after Tiro, I was required to spell everything out in full. No shortcuts were permitted in the classrooms of our times. Not even color for colour or favor for favour. Now, of course, proving that the circle is indeed round and it will come back again, we have a plethora of emojis, a hark back to pictorial writing and hieroglyphics. And, thanks to Twitter and texting, abbreviations are the rage once more. Ty used to be a boy’s name. Now, it simply says thank you (for sticking with this piece.) As with circles, this column will reappear in a week. c u then & TC.

Kevin Martin is a journalist based in Sydney, Australia