English
Etymology
From Middle F. obliquité, from L. obliquitas, from obliquus �oblique�.
Pronunciation
(UK) IPA|/��blɪkwɪti/
(US) IPA|/��blɪkwɪdi/, /o��blɪkwɪdi/
Noun
en-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, 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.
#*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.
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