Obliquity vs Turpitude - What's the difference?
obliquity | turpitude |
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:
*1851 ,
*: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 :
Mental or moral deviation or perversity; immorality.
* 1924 , Herman Melville, Billy Budd ,
* 2006 , Thomas Pynchon, Against the Day , Vintage 2007, p. 404:
The quality of being obscure, oftentimes willfully, sometimes as an exercise in euphemism.
* 1879 , Mark Twain, A Tramp Abroad ,
Inherent baseness, depravity or wickedness; corruptness and evilness.
*
An act evident of such a depravity.
As nouns the difference between obliquity and turpitude
is that obliquity is the quality of being oblique in direction, deviating from the horizontal or vertical; (or) the angle created by such a deviation while turpitude is inherent baseness, depravity or wickedness; corruptness and evilness.obliquity
English
Noun
(obliquities)- 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
- 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.
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.
- 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.
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.