Jumping into the frying pan, or the fire, as the case may be-since the rest of you have swept through the gutters and gone on world-wide pidgin hunts since this thread began, and I just now looked in--
A griddle can be round, square, or oblong, but has almost no sides atall...
And I never knew before why some cooks called the skillet a spider. They took the word away from its original meaning and the only connection I could see was that a flat-bottomed skillet might be good for smashing spiders!