| Definitions | | obliquity |
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noun (obliquities)
- The quality of being oblique in direction; deviating from the horizontal or vertical, or the angle created by such a deviation.
- 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
- Mental or moral deviation or perversity; immorality.
- 1924, Herman Melville, Billy Budd, http://etext.virginia.edu/etcbin/ot2www-pubeng?specfile=/texts/english/modeng/publicsearch/modengpub.o2w&act=text&offset=475338594&textreg=2&query=obliquities&id=MelBill 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 "as it quite often came down to, varieties of pimp.
- The quality of being obscure, oftentimes willfully, sometimes as an exercise in euphemism.
- 1879, Mark Twain, A Tramp Abroad, http://etext.virginia.edu/etcbin/ot2www-pubeng?specfile=/texts/english/modeng/publicsearch/modengpub.o2w&act=text&offset=644798885&textreg=2&query=obliquities&id=TwaTram 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.
Etymology: From Middle obliquité, from obliquitas, from obliquus "oblique".
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