Comment by ajross

To be nitpicky: I wasn't irked by the article's title, but by the framing in the lede.

To be constructively nitpicky: a box used as a wing is absolutely an "airfoil" inasmuch as the term has any meaning. It's not the shape being "special" that makes a wing work, it's the shape that the airflow around it takes, which is to first approximation just a function of its "tilt" along its major axis relative to the flow direction. The business about shape is all just optimization, not what you want to describe if you want to know how an airplane flies.