Obliquity
Pronunciation
- UK IPA: /əˈblɪkwɪti/
- US IPA: /əˈblɪkwɪɾi/, /oʊˈblɪkwɪɾi/
Origin
From Middle French obliquité, from Latin obliquitas, from obliquus ("oblique").
Full definition of obliquity
Noun
obliquity
(plural obliquities)- The quality of being oblique in direction, deviating from the horizontal or vertical; or the angle created by such a deviation. from 15th c.
- 1667, John Milton, Paradise Lost, lines 766-769:The Planet Earth, so stedfast though she seem,
Insensibly three different Motions move?
Which else to several Sphears thou must ascribe,
Mov'd contrarie with thwart obliquities - 1851, Herman Melville, ,Screwed at its axis against the side, a swinging lamp slightly oscillates in Jonah’s room; and the ship, heeling over towards the wharf with the weight of the last bales received, the lamp, flame and all, though in slight motion, still maintains a permanent obliquity with reference to the room; though, in truth, infallibly straight itself, it but made obvious the false, lying levels among which it hung.
- 1897, Henry James, What Maisie Knew:She wore glasses which, in humble reference to a divergent obliquity of vision, she called her straighteners, and a little ugly snuff-coloured dress trimmed with satin bands in the form of scallops and glazed with antiquity.
- Mental or moral deviation or perversity; immorality. from 15th c.
- 1924, Herman Melville, Billy Budd, Chapter 2:Habitually living with the elements and knowing little more of the land than as a beach, or, rather, that portion of the terraqueous globe providentially set apart for dance-houses, doxies and tapsters, in short what sailors call a "fiddlers'-green," his simple nature remained unsophisticated by those moral obliquities which are not in every case incompatible with that manufacturable thing known as respectability.
- 2006, Thomas Pynchon, Against the Day, Vintage 2007, p. 404:Stray's friends, apt to keep more to the shadows, tended to be practitioners of obliquity—as it quite often came down to, varieties of pimp.
- The quality of being obscure, oftentimes willfully, sometimes as an exercise in euphemism. from 17th c.
- 1879, Mark Twain, A Tramp Abroad, Chapter 25:That spiked my gun. I could not say anything. I was entirely out of verbal obliquities; to go further would be to lie, and that I would not do; so I simply sat still and suffered , -- sat mutely and resignedly there, and sizzled, -- for I was being slowly fried to death in my own blushes.