Islands, polygons, purple dots - they all mean something to the school boundary line faithful in Howard County, who have absorbed the redistricting vernacular as if it were handed to them with an easy-to-follow booklet and translation tape.

"It's a public phenomenon," schools spokeswoman Patti Caplan said.

Parents and community members have bandied about the very specific terms.

Last year's high school redistricting started it, Caplan said, by introducing a citizens committee to draw suggested boundary lines and asking for lots of public input. Previous efforts were more in-house, and the lingo did not spread into the community.

Some phrases include domino effect, which was used to describe every movement made throughout the process, and sole egress, which describes a street's or a neighborhood's only exit.

"I've never heard people use 'egress' as often as they do here," said boundary line committee Chairwoman Ellen Giles.

"Sole egress" has been around for a long time, but "polygons" is new. The word describes a geographic area and the families within it. Parents speaking at public hearings wielded their "poly" numbers like addresses.

"My neighborhood doesn't really have a name, so we'll just call it Poly 154," Matt Orth, an Ellicott City parent, said at one hearing.

"At least we didn't call them 'concave' or 'complex polygons,'" said Tom Grobicki, boundary line committee assistant chairman. "That would have really got them."

Grobicki was on the high school redistricting committee last year, when polygons surfaced, but they were not implemented until this round.

David C. Drown, who provided the boundary line data and redistricting suggestions, said the word islands became a hot term this year. It describes a pocket of students attending a school out of its area.

One father, Steven Ferraro of Ellicott City, coined a term when he described his neighborhood's island situation: "One of these [redistricting] plans leaves us an island," he said, "and one makes us an outlying peninsula."

Talking about children as purple dots was another a frequent occurrence. The dots represented children on Drown's computer program, showing where pupils live. They led to statements such as this one from Sandra H. French, the board's vice chairman: "Those two purple dots, can we have them go to Gorman [Crossing Elementary]?"

Next year, to end confusion about what and who is really in a polygon, the boundary line committee may introduce words such as alpha and beta to differentiate commercial areas from residential, Giles said.

"I never in my wildest dreams thought I would be using language like that and that those elements of redistricting would have such an important meaning," said board member James P. O'Donnell. "Without them, the process would be so undefined as to make it virtually impossible."

A comment O'Donnell made during an early public work session says what many think about the redistricting process.

"No matter which way I looked at it," he said, "I couldn't figure it out."