Word of the day: obliquity

The word of the day is obliquity:

< Middle French obliquité inclination at an oblique angle (second half of the 13th cent. in Old French as obliqueté), angle at which the celestial equator is inclined to the ecliptic (c1370), indirectness, lack of frankness (1541) < classical Latin oblīquitāt-, oblīquitās inclination at an oblique angle, in post-classical Latin also indirectness, ambiguity (early 5th cent.), grammatical inflection (13th cent. in British sources) < oblīquusoblique adj. + -tās (see -ty suffix¹; compare -ity suffix).

 I. Physical senses.

 1.a. The quality of being oblique in direction, position, or form; inclination at an oblique angle to a straight line or plane; the degree or extent of such inclination.

b. Astron.  obliquity of the ecliptic n. the angle at which the plane of the ecliptic is inclined to that of the celestial equator.

c. Bot. Of a leaf: the property of having unequal sides.

 II. Non-physical senses.

2. Divergence from right conduct or thought; perversity, aberration; an instance of this, a fault, an error.

3. Indirectness in action, conduct, speech, etc.; a way or method that is not direct or straightforward.

4. Deviation from any rule or order. Obs. rare.

5. Grammar. Inflection for case, declension. Obs. rare. (OED)

"At first glance, it’s hard to reconcile the sparseness of Fontane’s plots, the way he prefers to linger over what he calls “the circumstantial,” with the extravagant emotions his work has provoked in so many critics and writers over the years. (Thomas Mann: “No writer of the past or the present awakens in me the sympathy and gratitude, the unconditional and instinctive delight, the immediate amusement and warmth and satisfaction that I feel in every verse, in every line of one of his letters, in every snatch of his dialogue.”) The key lies in his understated narrative style, in his paradoxically powerful “discretion,” as some critics have called it: a gift for obliquity, for knowing what to leave out, and above all for letting the reader “overhear” the speech of his characters, rather than paraphrasing it for us—the last being a particularly effective alternative to the psychologizing observations of an omniscient narrator."

 -  Daniel Mendelsohn, "Heroine Addict: What Theodor Fontane's women want", 7 March 2011 The New Yorker

I'm going with definition 3 here.