Word: perpendicularity
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...England's greatest cathedrals is Ely, a Norman-to-perpendicular pile which stands on an eminence commanding the fen country of Cambridgeshire. Named for the eels abounding in its waters, eely Ely is a market town of only 8,000-odd inhabitants. Its fairs, held on the feast of Saxon St. Etheldreda (or St. Audrey, whence the word tawdry), are still nominally run by the Bishop of Ely. There is not much else for His Lordship to do in Ely; nearby Cambridge has more religious life, and there the Ely diocesan conferences are held. Yet, because...
...ears. If a sound comes in at an angle, the slight time lag in the receivers causes the listener to hear it louder in one ear than in the other. He rotates the bar until the sound volume is equal in both ears; then the bar is perpendicular to the direction of the sound source. In antisubmarine practice, it was soon found impracticable to rotate the detector, whether attached to the hull of the patrol ship or towed behind. So the detector was kept stationary and the effect of rotation was obtained by lengthening the path from one receiver...
...Azores of Phillips Brooks House and the quiet harbors of the Yard. But, Columbus-like, the Vagabond pushes on into the unfamiliar waters ahead. Tacking unskillfully along the North Cambridge car line, Vag's frail cockleshell almost at once encounters a large white island; whose towering stone cliffs rise perpendicular from the water's edge. San Domingo, perhaps? No, young Columbus, it is on the map as Littauer Center. It is a new island in these parts. It is very long and solid and important-looking. It will be a wonderful place to land for an excursion sometime soon when...
...famed Michelson-Morley experiment of 1887, in which perpendicular beams of light were raced against each other, seemed to show that a light-carrying ether pervading all space did not exist. Fitzgerald, Larmor and Lorentz shored up the collapsing ether-concept by showing-theoretically-that a moving body must contract slightly in the direction of motion, that a moving clock would therefore slow down. Though imperceptible except at speeds approaching light's velocity (186,000 mi. per sec.), these changes would affect a Michelson-Morley apparatus just enough to cancel any possible observation of the ether-drift-by altering...
...shock, to entertain the reader; the painter, to amuse, to shock, to entertain the galleryite: both in-tend to jar your emotions. A fiction writer, to stir your guts, will split any infinitive that gets in the way. A painter, for the same reason, may draw his horizon line perpendicular, and scatter vanishing points like confetti...