don't think it only refers to addition? 'lateral' just lampshades the orthogonality of the imaginary line to the real on the complex plane. the stretchytwistyne

don't think it only refers to addition? 'lateral' just lampshades the orthogonality of the imaginary line to the real on the complex plane. the stretchytwistyness of multiplication simply inhabits said laterality. i mean you could argue that 'lateral' in-itself is insufficient to disambiguate between the complex numbers and other planar algebras like the duals or split-complexes or just plain-ol pairs with pairwise multiplication. but it's clear who's the belle of the ball. i guess if we want to be more inclusive we could call the pairwise-mults the plain- (pun intended) or boring-laterals, and the three planar complex algebras could collectively be called the stretchy-laterals, having sheary, twisty, and lorentzy (hyperbolic-twisty) subtypes.