Word of the day: fillip

The word of the day is fillip:

apparently onomatopoeic; compare flip n.¹, flirt n., used in similar sense. The n. and vb. appear nearly contemporaneously in 16th cent.; it is uncertain which is the source of the other.

1.a. A movement made by bending the last joint of a finger against the thumb and suddenly releasing it (so as to propel some small object, or merely as a gesture); a smart stroke or tap given by this means.

b. Something of small importance; a trifle. Also, a short space of time, a moment.

2. In a wider sense: A smart blow (with the fist, etc.). Now rare. 

3. Something that serves to rouse, excite, or animate; a stimulus.  (OED)

"Fontane charts the course of the Holks’ marital decline in his usual desultory way—there’s a slow accumulation of talk and events, and then that climactic fillip. The couple bicker about which schools to send the children to; Helmut, suddenly called upon to fulfill his duty as courtier, goes away to Copenhagen for some weeks, where he flirts inconclusively with his landlady’s daughter and, more conclusively, with Ebba ('Eve'), a rather spiky lady-in-waiting to the elderly Princess whom they both serve. He doesn’t write often enough to Christine; there’s a fire in the castle where the Princess is holding court (no one gets hurt); in a fit of midlife foolishness, Helmut tells Christine it’s all over and proposes to the lady-in-waiting, who then tells him off ('You’re always sinning against the most elementary rules of the game'); eventually, he comes home to his wife. The moment of narrative 'excitement' takes place five pages from the end of the book. As Holk’s scheming landlady says of her daughter’s wayward life, 'It’s something of a love-story but it’s not a proper love-story.'"

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

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.