"Tangent" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... you the most," said Nancy. "And it is there I am hoping for help from you." And here, perhaps to avoid the avowal which she felt might be coming, she took a tangent: ...
— Nancy Stair - A Novel • Elinor Macartney Lane
... such a device which was successfully employed in a chute of the above dimensions, 400 ft. long and having a drop of 110 ft. This chute had a maximum inclination of 45 and its lower end curved to a horizontal tangent, running into the storehouse. Near the bottom of the chute a horizontal strip was nailed across the upper edges and to it was nailed the upper end of a 20 ft., 112-in. board, the lower end of which rested on the bottom of the chute. Several pieces of timber spiked to the ...
— Concrete Construction - Methods and Costs • Halbert P. Gillette
... of the hospital sent her mind flying off at a tangent. Even the stage gave way for the moment to this new and all-absorbing occupation. Never in her life had she done anything so interesting. The escape from home, the personal contact with all those nice, jolly boys, the excitement of being of service ...
— Quin • Alice Hegan Rice
... respectful compliments to Miss Williams. If once this tangent flight of mine were over, and I were returned to my wonted leisurely motion in my old circle, I may probably endeavour to return her poetic compliment in ...
— The Letters of Robert Burns • Robert Burns
... all original. I claim the sole credit of it. Father and mother both saints. I am a moral tangent, flying off between them. Well, we are ...
— Ernest Linwood - or, The Inner Life of the Author • Caroline Lee Hentz
... no less by the contrariety than by the harmony of circumstance. For our surroundings affect us in two ways; subtly and permanently, tinging us through and through as wine tinges water, or, by some violent neighbourhood of antipathetic force, sending us off at a tangent as far as possible from the antagonistic presence that so detestably environs us. The fact that Charlotte Bronte knew chiefly clergymen is largely responsible for 'Shirley,' that satirical eulogy of the Church and apotheosis of Sunday-school teachers. ...
— Emily Bront • A. Mary F. (Agnes Mary Frances) Robinson
... maintaining that the "sacredness" of the number was of much more recent date than the creation of the worlds, and could not therefore account for it. He next tried an ingenious idea, comparing the perpendiculars from different points of a quadrant of a circle on a tangent at its extremity. The greatest of these, the tangent, not being cut by the quadrant, he called the line of the sun, and associated with infinite force. The shortest, being the point at the other end of the quadrant, thus corresponded to the fixed stars or zero force; intermediate ...
— Kepler • Walter W. Bryant
... almost the limit for that caliber of rifle; but the antelope turned a somersault and lay still, while its mates turned off at a tangent and tore ...
— Nan Sherwood at Rose Ranch • Annie Roe Carr
... tree that had torn father from the stern of the motor boat," continued Polly Jarley. "It may have been a big root of the same tree, under water, that had proved the finish of the boat. For nobody ever saw the Bright Eyes again. She just ran off at a tangent, into the middle of the lake, somewhere, we suppose, ...
— Wyn's Camping Days - or, The Outing of the Go-Ahead Club • Amy Bell Marlowe
... Law of Motion and the Parallelogram of Forces, instead of the earth going off at a tangent in the direction of A E, it will take a mean path in the direction of A B, its path being curved instead of being a ...
— Aether and Gravitation • William George Hooper
... apposition, abuttal[obs3], juxtaposition; abutment, osculation; meeting, appulse[obs3], rencontre[obs3], rencounter[obs3], syzygy[Astron], coincidence, coexistence; adhesion &c. 46; touching &c. v. (see touch 379). borderland; frontier &c. (limit) 233; tangent; abutter. V. be contiguous &c. adj.; join, adjoin, abut on, march with; graze, touch, meet, osculate, come in contact, coincide; coexist; adhere &c. 46. [transitive][cause to be contiguous] juxtapose; contact; join (unite) 43; link (vinculum) 45. Adj. contiguous; touching &c. v.; in contact ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... heart still incommunicate! Perhaps we were too anxious to hurry the moment, to enforce our own theory, to adduce instance from our own experience. Perhaps we were not patient enough to wait until our friend could express himself with ease and happiness. Perhaps we squandered the dialogue in tangent topics, ...
— Mince Pie • Christopher Darlington Morley
... of the case." And as he warmed to his theme the image of Victor Stott grew to a fearful grotesqueness. It loomed as a threat over the community and the church. Crashaw quoted, inaccurately, statistics of the growth of lunacy, and then went off at a tangent into the theory of possession by evil spirits. Since his rejection of science, he had lapsed into certain forms of mediaevalism, and he now began to dally with the theory of a malign incarnation which he elaborated until it became ...
— The Wonder • J. D. Beresford
... that she could turn off so suddenly at a complete tangent, spoke to her once or twice but got no other answer than a long, contented sigh. He stood for a little while trying to make out her outline in the dim corner of the room. Then he tiptoed out to the hall, possessed himself of a warm motor-rug, returned with it and laid ...
— Who Cares? • Cosmo Hamilton
... the upper part of the wild whirl, high in the sky, a black spot flew. Thrown at a tangent, it fell, growing larger and more bat-like as it fluttered down, striking the earth with a crash. It was the roof of ...
— The Boy with the U. S. Weather Men • Francis William Rolt-Wheeler
... joined in; he was fond of variety, and he sang some lines in a high falsetto which sounded like the whistling of the gaff (with perhaps a touch of razor-grinding added); then just when you expected him to soar off at a tangent to Patti's topmost A, he let his voice fall to his boots, and emitted a most bloodcurdling bass growl, which carried horrid suggestions of midnight fiends and ghouls and the silent tomb. Still, his mates thought he was a musical prodigy; ...
— A Dream of the North Sea • James Runciman
... frontier garrison, once Geordie's home and refuge. The tall flag-staff came suddenly into view, and in less than four minutes they would be rushing by. Over forty miles to the hour were they flying now. Big Ben had just let out another notch as they swung into the two-mile tangent, when at the same instant he and Geordie caught sight of three or four black dots dimly bobbing in the midst of a little dust-cloud on the roadway far ahead, and almost at the same instant came from each the low cry, ...
— To The Front - A Sequel to Cadet Days • Charles King
... line and a curve (mixed angle) or between two curves (curvilinear angle) is measured by the angle between the line and the tangent at the point of intersection, or between the tangents to both curves at their common point. Various names (now rarely, if ever, used) have been given to particular cases:—amphicyrtic (Gr. [Greek: amphi], on both sides, [Greek: kyrtos], convex) or cissoidal (Gr. [Greek: kissos], ivy), ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 2, Part 1, Slice 1 • Various
... properties of the curve, upon which the action of the instrument depends, are illustrated in Fig. 2, where MM, NN, are the two branches of an hyperbola; C the center; AB the major axis; F and F' the foci. If now a tangent TT be drawn at any point as P of either branch, and a perpendicular let fall upon it from the nearer focus F be produced to cut at G a line drawn from P to the farther focus F', then this perpendicular will cut the tangent at a point I upon the circumference of a circle described about C upon ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 530, February 27, 1886 • Various
... weirdness, her vitality. The whole atmosphere of the theatre was electrified by her personality. She was singing a song in a way that he had never heard before. He remembered it still. It was a Tango song. "His Tango girl!" His thoughts flew off at a tangent.... ...
— "Contemptible" • "Casualty"
... wives forget that they cannot satisfy every mood of a man without study or effort, unless they are remarkably gifted. Many a wife has neglected her mind, body and powers and when some woman with developed powers enters her marriage orbit, she flies off at a tangent, admits defeat and gets a divorce without putting forth an effort to win back the husband who is ...
— The Colored Girl Beautiful • E. Azalia Hackley
... rambling meditations. First he thought of his friends, and wondered when they would join him; then his mind reverted to Mrs. Martha Bardell; and from that lady it wandered, by a natural process, to the dingy counting-house of Dodson & Fogg. From Dodson & Fogg's it flew off at a tangent, to the very centre of the history of the queer client; and then it came back to the Great White Horse at Ipswich, with sufficient clearness to convince Mr. Pickwick that he was falling asleep. So he roused himself, and ...
— The Pickwick Papers • Charles Dickens
... says Lady Rylton. "Just when you expect her to sympathize with you, she starts off at a tangent on some other absurd idea. She is full of fads. After all, it would be rash to depend on her. But you, ...
— The Hoyden • Mrs. Hungerford
... entire time to operas, theatres, balls, receptions and levees, and they are in a perpetual whirl, like a whip-top, spinning round and round and round very prettily until it loses its equipoise and shoots off into a tangent. But the difference is, in one case it is a top and in the other ...
— The Wedding Ring - A Series of Discourses for Husbands and Wives and Those - Contemplating Matrimony • T. De Witt Talmage
... or two from Charles, Biddle Street performs a jog, dashing off at a tangent from its former course, while Chase Street not only jogs and turns at the corresponding intersection, but does so again, where, at the next corner, it meets at once with Park Avenue and Berkeley Street. After this it runs ...
— American Adventures - A Second Trip 'Abroad at home' • Julian Street
... a tangent to a certain issue troubling his legal conscience. He had not wavered in the usual assumption of omniscience, but he was by no means sure that he had given right advice. Well! Without that power to decide ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... it was that Sebastian Dolores paid no attention to the progress of the released landlord of "The Red Eagle," though, by a glance out of the corner of his eyes, he made sure that the footsteps of liberated guilt were marching at a tangent from where he was—even to ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... as if the fact scarcely concerned her, and Lanfear drew a breath of relief in his surprise. He asked, at another tangent: "What made you ...
— Between The Dark And The Daylight • William Dean Howells
... on Piedra Creek. Beyond this creek lay Long Prairie, the favourite haunt of the plover. As they were nearing the creek they heard the galloping of a horse to their right, and saw a man with black hair and a swarthy face riding toward the woods at a tangent, as if he ...
— Whirligigs • O. Henry
... were not attracted by the Earth, she would glide through the Heavens along an indefinite straight line, escaping at the tangent. But in virtue of the attraction that governs the movements of all the Heavenly bodies, our satellite at a distance of 60 times the terrestrial half-diameter revolves round us in 27 days, 7 hours, 43 minutes, 11-1/2 seconds, continually leaving the straight ...
— Astronomy for Amateurs • Camille Flammarion
... sake of economy of space, our cut omits the Point and Swannanoa tunnels (the latter is the summit tunnel), but covers all of the location which is of interest to engineers, the remainder at the Swannanoa end being almost "on tangent" to and through ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 586, March 26, 1887 • Various
... temperature." Certain phenomena connected with the administration of electric baths having forced upon me some doubts in this respect, I made very careful experiments, both with and without the aid of the galvanometer (Bradley's Tangent), to satisfy these. Without wearying the reader with details, I will state that the result of my experiments leaves no room for doubt that water at the temperatures stated—and still more so at 98 1/2 deg.—is superior to the human body as a conductor of electricity. I do not mean ...
— The Electric Bath • George M. Schweig
... accipiet te laeta; neque uxor Optima, nec dulces occurrent oscula nati Praeripere, et tacita pectus dulcedine tangent." ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 69, February 22, 1851 • Various
... Harcourt, "brush up your mathematics. At what angle, and with what degree of force, should we have swooped down there on a tangent, when the horses rounded ...
— From Jest to Earnest • E. P. Roe
... of this fact led almost immediately to the Method of Tangents of Fermat and Barrow; and this again is the stepping-stone to the Differential Calculus,—itself a particular application of that instrument. Dr. Barrow regarded the tangent as merely the prolongation of any one of these infinitely small sides, and demonstrated the relations of these sides to the curve and its ordinates. His work, entitled "Lectiones Geometricae," appeared in 1669. To his high abilities ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, No. 20, June, 1859 • Various
... one at the wheel the Maggie shot off at a tangent and the hawsers slacked immediately. In the twinkling of an eye Mr. Gibney had cast them off, and as the ends disappeared with a swish over the stern he ran back to the pilot house, rang for full ...
— Captain Scraggs - or, The Green-Pea Pirates • Peter B. Kyne
... I should be reproached with indolence and even cowardice. I knew that I should be supposed to be one of those consistently impracticable people who insist on going off at a tangent when the straight course lies before them. That I should be relegated to the class of persons who have failed in life through some deep-seated defect of will. The worst of a serious decision of the kind is that, whichever ...
— From a College Window • Arthur Christopher Benson
... around, and bending low to avoid the bullets he sped at a tangent in the opposite direction, for the timber of Wheeling Hill. The Indians afoot could not catch him, no bullet caught him; he would make it—he would make it; there he goes, up the hill. He was safe—but ...
— Boys' Book of Frontier Fighters • Edwin L. Sabin
... uttering a word. The only people who were excited were bawling drunkards and excitable individuals of the same sort as the gesticulatory cabinet-maker. Every one knew the latter as a man really of mild disposition, but he was liable on occasion to get excited and to fly off at a tangent if anything struck him in a certain way. I did not see Liza and Mavriky Nikolaevitch arrive. Petrified with amazement, I first noticed Liza some distance away in the crowd, and I did not at once catch sight of Mavriky Nikolaevitch. ...
— The Possessed - or, The Devils • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... makes you, after all, for the vulgar, indistinguishable from other men. What's the most inveterate mark of men in general? Why the capacity to spend endless time with dull women—to spend it I won't say without being bored, but without minding that they are, without being driven off at a tangent by it; which comes to the same thing. I'm your dull woman, a part of the daily bread for which you pray at church. That covers your ...
— The Beast in the Jungle • Henry James
... main. I shall not stop to describe the progress of the attack; suffice it that it was as successful as could have been wished, and that Seaforth was referred back again to the lady. The happy lover was off at a tangent; the botanical party was soon overtaken; and the arm of Caroline, whom a vain endeavor to spell out the Linnaean name of a daffy-down-dilly had detained a little in the rear of the others, was soon firmly ...
— Humorous Ghost Stories • Dorothy Scarborough
... First he thought of his friends, and wondered when they would join him; then his mind reverted to Mrs. Martha Bardell; and from that lady it wandered, by a natural process, to the dingy counting-house of Dodson and Fogg. From Dodson and Fogg's it flew off at tangent, to the very centre of the history of the queer client; and then it came back to the Great White Horse at Ipswich, with sufficient clearness to convince Mr. Pickwick that he was falling asleep: so he aroused himself, and began to undress, when he recollected he had left his watch ...
— Bardell v. Pickwick • Percy Fitzgerald
... sights should be lost or rendered useless, tangent firing may be resorted to against ships, by pointing with the wooden dispart-sight at such part of the ship as the Tables indicate for the distance, and according to the class of gun in use ...
— Ordnance Instructions for the United States Navy. - 1866. Fourth edition. • Bureau of Ordnance, USN
... room to do this, and as he paused on the threshold there was a sudden crash. Part of the air pump seemed to fly off at a tangent, and a second later had smashed down on the Cardite motor. This stopped in an instant, and the projectile began falling. Fortunately it was but a short distance above the moon's surface, and came down with a jar, which did not injure ...
— Lost on the Moon - or In Quest Of The Field of Diamonds • Roy Rockwood
... 'argument' (to a function), used so often as to have become a new word (like 'piano' from 'pianoforte'). "The sine function takes 1 arg, but the arc-tangent function can take either 1 or 2 args." Compare {param}, ...
— The Jargon File, Version 4.0.0
... tartly, "a fly has no property—your Aunt Selina had. Oh, my dear," she added, darting away at a tangent, "to think that last night you and Basil should have been witnesses of a melodrama at the Marlow Theatre, at the very time this real tragedy was taking place in the ...
— The Secret Passage • Fergus Hume
... The revolution of the sun in such an orbit was known to the Author of the Bible when he wrote, "his circuit is to the end of heaven." The direction of the circumference of a circle being known, that of its center can be found; for the radius is always a tangent to the circumference, and the intersection of two of these radii will be the center; so that, if we certainly knew the sun's orbit to be circular, or nearly so, we could calculate the center. But as we do not certainly know its form, ...
— Fables of Infidelity and Facts of Faith - Being an Examination of the Evidences of Infidelity • Robert Patterson
... Sequin hasn't been playing with Don Morley's money," said Decker, resuming the subject from which Mrs. Ivy had flown off at a tangent. "Donald has always left everything to him, and doesn't know anything more about his investments than I do. All he is concerned with is spending his income, and that keeps ...
— A Romance of Billy-Goat Hill • Alice Hegan Rice
... {88} and, rejecting the force altogether, declared that if such a thing there were, it would be as the inverse square of the distance. Newton, ready prepared with the mathematics of the subject, tried the fall of the moon towards the earth, away from her tangent, and found that, as compared with the fall of a stone, the law of the inverse square did hold for the moon. He deduced the ellipse, he proceeded to deduce the effect of the disturbance of the sun upon the moon, ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume I (of II) • Augustus De Morgan
... was my fault," admitted Parmalee. "Mr. Drew accidentally knocked my cane out of my hand, and I flew off at a tangent and was nasty about ...
— Doubloons—and the Girl • John Maxwell Forbes
... at a tangent for the dark shadow of the trees. At the edge of the timber ensued another long wait, with Rathburn uncommunicative, moodily pacing restlessly back and forth. The horses had another excellent opportunity to rest and the fagged ...
— The Coyote - A Western Story • James Roberts
... the subject of it had had time to cast aside her fur cloak, to fasten upon her slender, arched feet, clad in dainty, laced boots, a pair of steel skates, with tangent blades, and without either grooves or straps, and to dart out upon this miniature sheet of water with the agility of a person accustomed to skating on the great lakes ...
— Zibeline, Complete • Phillipe de Massa
... keep his health in a passable condition. I have had positions of some importance handed to me, which I discharged with eminent satisfaction to all concerned until I got ready to go off at some new tangent. If I did not imagine myself in the actual embrace of some grave physical or mental disease, I feared that something would in the near future attack me; and that brings me to the main topic ...
— Confessions of a Neurasthenic • William Taylor Marrs
... banked at their feet. A stronger gust came in the air. A scattering of leaves clustered together and moved with sudden agitation across the sward before them; paused and seemed to be trying to flutter a hold into the ground; rushed aimlessly at a tangent to their former direction; paused again; and again seemed to be holding on. Before a sudden gust they were spun helplessly upward, sported aloft in mazy arabesques, scattered ...
— If Winter Comes • A.S.M. Hutchinson
... obliquely, or even with too great or too little force, drives it perilously wide of its mark. It can recover the safe track only by a sudden and often violent lunge of the opposing racket. The straight course is life, the tangent disease, the ...
— Preventable Diseases • Woods Hutchinson
... particularly useful to you. Among these are Wordsworth, Coleridge, Southey, Hazlitt, and Leigh Hunt. You cannot know Lamb without knowing these men, and some of them are of the highest importance. From the circle of Lamb's own work you may go off at a tangent at various points, according to your inclination. If, for instance, you are drawn towards poetry, you cannot, in all English literature, make a better start than with Wordsworth. And Wordsworth will send you backwards to a comprehension of the poets against whose influence Wordsworth fought. When ...
— LITERARY TASTE • ARNOLD BENNETT
... by an onslaught from behind. It is the more surprising, as I think it may be conceded that I have myself pretty well in hand by this time, and that my nerves, unruly as nature saw fit to make them, are now my very abject slaves. Occasionally one of our fiction carpenters flies off at a tangent and treats us to a series of intellectual gymnastics, the significance of which—so we are called upon to digest—is that the soul of one dead, finding its present clime too warm—or too cold—or having left something undone ...
— What Dreams May Come • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... element of a curve is very near being a straight line. And the smaller it is, the nearer. In the limit, it may be termed a part of the curve or a part of the straight line, as you please, for in each of its points a curve coincides with its tangent. So likewise "vitality" is tangent, at any and every point, to physical and chemical forces; but such points are, as a fact, only views taken by a mind which imagines stops at various moments of the movement that generates the curve. In reality, life is no more made of physico-chemical elements ...
— Creative Evolution • Henri Bergson
... deemed me such. My father was greatly pleased when I wrote him that I was now more than ever convinced of the wisdom of choosing the law as my profession, and was satisfied that I had come to my senses at last. He had still been prepared to see me "go off at a tangent," as he expressed it. On the other hand, the powerful effect of the appeal made by Weathersfield and Mr. Watling must not be underestimated. Here in one object lesson was emphasized a host of suggestions each of which had made its impression. ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... the gravitational pull of the sun, which has a mass 333,432 times that of the earth. If at any moment the sun ceased to exert this pull the earth would instantly fly off into space straight in the direction in which it was moving at the time, that is to say, at a tangent. This tendency to fly off at a tangent is continuous. It is the balance between it and the sun's pull which keeps the earth to her almost circular orbit. In the same way the seven other planets are held to ...
— The Outline of Science, Vol. 1 (of 4) - A Plain Story Simply Told • J. Arthur Thomson
... pseudo-fashionable world, for his own family had been of conservative stock, and Beatrix and Bobby had been the first of the Danes to break down the barriers of their own exclusive set. To be sure, he realized that in a city like New York it was quite possible for circles of equal choiceness to exist tangent to each other, yet in mutual ignorance of one another; but his years abroad in slower-moving countries had not prepared him for the countless agile performers clambering up and down over the social trapeze. In ...
— The Dominant Strain • Anna Chapin Ray
... that degree of intellectual concentration which could enable him to examine a subject to its close. He would begin to talk with me seriously enough, and with a due solemnity, about the suit against him; but, in a tangent, he would dart off to the consideration of some trifle, some household matter, or petty affair, of which, at any other time, he must have known that his hearers had no wish to hear. Poor Julia confirmed ...
— Confession • W. Gilmore Simms
... fly off at a tangent, ten to one Miss Clare'll be down the next day and set all straight again," was the general verdict on ...
— The Princess of the School • Angela Brazil
... sufferer lay holding a hand of Nancy between his cheek and the pillow—with intervals of silence and blithe speech. His disordered mind, it appeared, was still pursuing its unfortunate tangent. ...
— The Seeker • Harry Leon Wilson
... directors in the flesh, but they were all scanning him. He stood at the end of the table and fastened his eyes on a railway map that bedecked the opposite wall, one of those mendacious maps showing a trans-continental line of unbroken tangent; three thousand miles of railway without a curve, the opposition ...
— Bunker Bean • Harry Leon Wilson
... was certainly approaching the Moon. It had by this time turned over considerably under the influence of attraction, but its own original motion still followed a decidedly oblique direction. The consequence of these two forces might possibly be a tangent, line approaching the edge of the Moon's disc. One thing was certain: the Projectile had not yet commenced to fall directly towards her surface; its base, in which its centre of gravity lay, was still turned away considerably ...
— All Around the Moon • Jules Verne
... slowly into the street, grumbling indistinctly to himself in a perplexed tone of voice. Salisbury looked out after him, and saw him maundering along the pavement, halting now and then and swaying indecisively, and then starting off at some fresh tangent. The sky had cleared, and white fleecy clouds were fleeting across the moon, high in the heaven. The light came and went by turns as the clouds passed by, and, turning round as the clear white rays shone into the passage, Salisbury saw the little ball of crumpled paper which the woman had ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery In Four Volumes - Mystic-Humorous Stories • Various
... first-class scare when the train drew up in the squalid station, where the branch line to Haifa meets the main Hedjaz railway and the two together touch a mean town at a tangent; for a French officer in uniform boarded the train and stalked down the corridors staring hard at everyone. He asked me for a passport, which was sheer bluff, so I asked him in turn for his own authority. He smiled and produced a rubber stamp, saying that ...
— Affair in Araby • Talbot Mundy
... at a tangent. "It's—I don't know if you'll understand—interesting to meet you again. I've remembered you. I don't know why, but I have. I've used you as a sort of lay figure—when I've told myself stories. But you've always ...
— Tono Bungay • H. G. Wells
... big dividing board," he went on, "they are distributed and connected each in its place to the delicate tangent galvanometers and sensitive indicators you see in this room. These instantly announce the most minute change in the working of the current, and each office has a distinct separate metallic circuit. Why, even a hole as small as a lead pencil in ...
— The War Terror • Arthur B. Reeve
... but the expression on his face was eloquent enough. I knew, without being told. Suddenly he broke out at a fresh tangent. ...
— The Lady of the Basement Flat • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... and down thinking in what manner he might contrive it, when Jack, who was sitting, as usual, in a chair by the capstern with his porter by him, said to himself, "Now I'll lay my life that Ned wants to make friends, and is ashamed to speak first; I may be mistaken, and he may fly off at a tangent; but even if I am, at all events it will not be I who am wrong—I'll try him." Jack waited till Gascoigne passed him again, and then said, looking kindly and ...
— Mr. Midshipman Easy • Frederick Marryat
... the habit of wandering off on a meditative tangent to the circle of conversation. I was brought ...
— The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne • William J. Locke
... run the risk of Senator Burleigh going off at a tangent," said Miss Carter, sharply. "By the way, you cannot deny that you have given him encouragement; you have neither eyes nor ears for any one else ...
— Senator North • Gertrude Atherton
... beat into Annie's cheeks. She went off swiftly at a tangent. "Wouldn't it give a fellow a jar? This guy Jim Collins slips it to me confidential that he's off the crooked stuff. Nothin' doin' a-tall in gorilla work. He kids me that he's quit goin' out on the spud and porch-climbin' don't look good to him no more. A four-room ...
— The Big-Town Round-Up • William MacLeod Raine
... hand clenched suddenly—his mind was off at a tangent, away for the moment from her. Well, they had failed last night in all save murder! Failed—and one of them had already paid the price, and another, in the Tombs awaiting trial, faced the certainty of the death chair in Sing ...
— The Further Adventures of Jimmie Dale • Frank L. Packard
... snow fell steadily and I tramped on over the joint signature of the girl and the rabbit. Near the lake they parted company, the rabbit leading off at a tangent, on a line parallel with the lake, while his pursuer’s ...
— The House of a Thousand Candles • Meredith Nicholson
... to feelings of great kindness, said to me, "I could, from this moment, consider the examination at an end. I will, however, for my own pleasure, ask you two more questions. What are the relations of a curved line to the straight line that is a tangent to it?" I looked upon this question as a particular case of the theory of osculations which I had studied in Legrange's "Fonctions Analytiques." "Finally," said the examiner to me, "how do you determine the ...
— Biographies of Distinguished Scientific Men • Francois Arago
... of the chair in silence, and the collector plodded off at a tangent in the direction of his next quarry. This appearing to be an old lady, he presently altered his course. With a caution bred of experience, he would approach her ...
— Anthony Lyveden • Dornford Yates
... grade, And coast on the tangent mile, While the Driver toys with the throttle-bar, And gathers ...
— Behind the Arras - A Book of the Unseen • Bliss Carman
... which, were it worth while to go into its details, we should need some further diagrams to make it quite clear. Nor is it worth while to go into the description of various minor points of refinement about the gun mounting, such as the very exposed long tangent scale seen in the figure, by which the elevation or depression is read off, nor the still more exposed and rather ricketty arrangement by which the rear sight is arranged to rise and fall with the gun, and allowance for dispart ...
— Scientific American, Vol.22, No. 1, January 1, 1870 • Various
... They were as downright and unconsidering, as little capable of the reasoned middle attitude. Proudhon, perceiving that the world was obsessed by a misconception of the scope of property whereby the many were enslaved to the few, went off at a tangent to the announcement that "Property is Robbery," an exaggeration that, as I have already shown, still haunts Socialist discussion. The ultimate factor of all human affairs, the psychological factor, ...
— New Worlds For Old - A Plain Account of Modern Socialism • Herbert George Wells
... so evenly his mood of irresponsible insouciance that the soberness with which he announced that it was his sister who was to join them at dinner sent Archie's thoughts darting away at a new tangent of speculation. He had so accommodated himself to the idea that the Governor was a man without ties, or with all his ties broken, that this intimation that he had a sister who was still on friendly enough terms with him to visit his house—an establishment which ...
— Blacksheep! Blacksheep! • Meredith Nicholson
... there were two atoms which were each formed by a nucleus and a number of electrons swinging around about the nucleus as pictured in Fig. 104. The electrons are going of their own accord and the nucleus keeps them from flying off at a tangent, the way mud flies from the wheel of an automobile. Suppose these two atoms are free to turn but not to move far from their present positions. They will turn so as to make their electron paths parallel just as did ...
— Letters of a Radio-Engineer to His Son • John Mills
... in their outward lot do not find in life sufficient enjoyment to make it valuable to them, the cause generally is, caring for nobody but themselves."] It is saner, less likely to be veered off on some tangent of ...
— Problems of Conduct • Durant Drake
... proximity to a German H.E. Woolly Bear exploding. It gives one rather a sickening sensation. Another came over. This time it burst nearer. "Gee! they're dropping the range." I hastily grabbed my tripod and hurried off at a tangent. Proceeding for a distance of about five hundred yards I turned off again and made tracks ...
— How I Filmed the War - A Record of the Extraordinary Experiences of the Man Who - Filmed the Great Somme Battles, etc. • Lieut. Geoffrey H. Malins
... position, figured P' N', and it be carried in similar directions, coinciding with the dotted horizontal curve so far, as to cut the magnetic curves on the same side with it, the current will be from P' to N'. If the wire be considered a tangent to the curved surface of the cylindrical magnet, and it be carried round that surface into any other position, or if the magnet itself be revolved on its axis, so as to bring any part opposite to the tangential wire,—still, if afterwards the wire be moved ...
— Experimental Researches in Electricity, Volume 1 • Michael Faraday
... hour, or more, on a straight railway; that the engine was exhibited at one shilling admittance, including a ride for the few who were not too timid; that it ran for some weeks, when a rail broke and occasioned the engine to fly off in a tangent and overturn, the ground being very soft at the time. Mr. Trevithick having expended all his means in erecting the works and enclosure, and the shillings not having come in fast enough to pay current expenses, the engine was not ...
— Railway Adventures and Anecdotes - extending over more than fifty years • Various
... Ishmael? you and the judge? Well, Merlin did start off at a tangent yesterday from Tanglewood. I suppose he is pining after his child, and has taken a sudden freak to rush over and see her. And as you are the staff of his age, of course, he would not think of undertaking so long a journey ...
— Self-Raised • Emma Dorothy Eliza Nevitte Southworth
... cut 'em off at the Gut," called Frank, and he struck away at a tangent from their course as the man disappeared around the house and the motor car could be heard roaring ...
— The Radio Boys on the Mexican Border • Gerald Breckenridge
... get ground up in the hopper like everybody else or shut the door of the industrial squirrel-cage on yourself in order not to starve. Perhaps that'll give some cleverer person the courage to start out on his own tangent." ...
— The Squirrel-Cage • Dorothy Canfield
... this Happy Valley ran Market Street, a bias cut across the city that was to be. Market Street is about all that saved that city from making a checker-board of its ground-plan. Market Street flew off at a tangent and set all the south portion of the town at an angle that is rather a relief than anything else that I know of. Who wants to go on forever up one street and down another, and then across town at right angles, as if life ...
— In the Footprints of the Padres • Charles Warren Stoddard
... fibres of wood, it is clear at once why knots and "cross-grain" interfere with the strength of timber. It is due to the structural peculiarities that "honeycombing" occurs in rapid seasoning, that checks or cracks extend radially and follow pith rays, that tangent or "bastard" cut stock shrinks and warps more than that which is quarter-sawn. These same peculiarities enable oak to take a better finish than basswood ...
— Seasoning of Wood • Joseph B. Wagner
... Wycherley, was a madman with an illusion about a precipice; John Howard a moral lunatic in whom the affections were reversed; Saul a moping maniac with homicidal paroxysms and nocturnal visions; Paul an incoherent lunatic, who in his writings flies off at a tangent, and who admits having once been the victim of a photopsic illusion in broad daylight; Nebuchadnezzar a lycanthropical lunatic; Joan of Arc a theomaniac; Bobby Burton and Oliver Cromwell melancholy maniacs; Napoleon an ambitious maniac, in whom the sense of impossibility became ...
— Hard Cash • Charles Reade
... an unexpectedly disagreeable turn. Gray had anticipated an unpleasant moment or two, but this—well, it was indeed the crash. Calamity had overtaken him from the very quarter he had least expected and most dreaded, and his mind raced off at a tangent; a dozen unwelcome ...
— Flowing Gold • Rex Beach
... of music, and all about them women darting into line, sudden banners floating out, and the white horse prancing in the archway, for all the world as if spun at a tangent off the ...
— Star-Dust • Fannie Hurst
... and heart that thumped painfully, I plied the paddle, while the craft swung off at a tangent across the dark green whirling which, marked by white concentric rings, swung round and round a down-sucking hollow in the center. Twice we shot past the latter, and had time to notice how a battered log of driftwood tilted endways and went down, but as on the second revolution we swept toward ...
— Lorimer of the Northwest • Harold Bindloss
... fascination she ought to have married well. I'm sure her friends have tried hard enough for her. But what can you do with a girl who throws herself at the heads of ineligibles, and when one trots out an unexceptionable PARTI and does one's best to bring them together, goes off at a tangent and lets the whole thing drop through. You know how it was with....' Lady Tallant ...
— Lady Bridget in the Never-Never Land • Rosa Praed
... Machines Unstable. The Application of Power. The Supporting Surfaces. Area not the Essential Thing. The Law of Gravity. Gravity. Indestructibility of Gravitation. Distance Reduces Gravitational Pull. How Motion Antagonizes Gravity. A Tangent. Tangential Motion Represents Centrifugal Pull. Equalizing the Two Motions. Lift and Drift. Normal Pressure. Head Resistance. Measuring Lift and Drift. Pressure at Different Angles. Difference Between ...
— Aeroplanes • J. S. Zerbe***
... projectile visibly drew nearer the moon. It was, therefore, submitted in some proportion to its influence; but its own velocity also inclined it in an oblique line. Perhaps the result of these two influences would be a line that would become a tangent. But it was certain that the projectile was not falling normally upon the surface of the moon, for its base, by reason of its weight, ought to have been ...
— The Moon-Voyage • Jules Verne
... space of ground. Men who had noticed how very little David's heart had been in his work were amazed to see the reckless courage he displayed. Round and round the mill he flew, keeping the outside stock from flying off at a tangent, and soothing and quieting the beasts nearest to him with his voice. The "run" was over as suddenly as it commenced, and the men, breathless and exhausted, stood around ...
— Winter Evening Tales • Amelia Edith Huddleston Barr
... is more interesting, in some ways, not to have everything cut and dried from the start," she went on, striking off at a tangent, with an innate perversity incomprehensible to a mere man. "It prevents a headlong fall into the commonplace: and there is a certain excitement in looking on, so to speak, at one's own personal drama, without feeling ...
— The Great Amulet • Maud Diver
... Apsis. Chord. Cycloid. Conoid. Conic Section. Ellipsoid. Epicycloid. Evolute. Flying Buttress. Focus. Gnomes. Hexagon. Hyperbola. Hypothenuse. Incidental. Isosceles. Triangle. Parabola. Parallelogram. Pelecoid. Polygons. Pyramid. Rhomb. Sector. Segment. Sinusoid. Tangent. Tetrahedron. Vertex. ...
— Carpentry for Boys • J. S. Zerbe
... two hands, stand erect and whirl round on his heels till momentum was obtained, and then—let go. The missile would fly like a bullet, and woe betide any one who stood in its way. The performance precluded any kind of aim; the stone was hurled off at any chance tangent: and it was bad luck rather than any kind of malice that guided one three-pound boulder through the window, across the kitchen, and into a portrait of Judas de Beer which hung on the wall not half a dozen feet from the ...
— Vrouw Grobelaar and Her Leading Cases - Seventeen Short Stories • Perceval Gibbon
... a wonder, Arved. You fly off on a wild tangent stimulated by the mere sound of a word. Who said anything about dynamite-anarchy? There's another sort that men of brains—madmen if you will—believe and indirectly teach. Emerson was one, though he hardly knew it. Thoreau realized it for him, however. Don't you remember ...
— Visionaries • James Huneker
... incredible dexterity through each other's ranks; and the pattern was a cross, a tricolor. Then they wheeled round the circle that was and was not their goal, and did it all over again; but instead of intersecting at the center circle they struck off there at a tangent, and the pattern, blue by blue divided from white by white, and all red-flecked, was two wide V's set point to point, a pattern that ran away and vanished as each thread, returning, wheeled round the circle whence the other thread ...
— The Combined Maze • May Sinclair
... be described in words as follows: Required the area between a curve, the axis of x and two ordinates; it is necessary to draw a new curve, such that its steepness, as measured by the tangent of the inclination, may be proportional to the ordinate of the given curve for the same value of x, then the ascent made by the new curve in passing from one ordinate to the other is a measure of the ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 288 - July 9, 1881 • Various
... Her eyes were glistening with as yet unshed tears. "I've never seen you go off on a wild tangent like this before! On the word of an old fraud like Forsythe, a man who lies about half the time, you talk the Administration into sinking hundreds of millions of dollars into the biggest space lift ...
— Fifty Per Cent Prophet • Gordon Randall Garrett
... tangent, leaving Jeffreys, cool in body and mind, to await his return. To an ordinarily excitable person, the position was a critical one. The water was numbing; the ice at the edge of the hole was rotten, and broke away with every effort he made to climb on to it; even Julius, floundering beside him, bewildered, ...
— A Dog with a Bad Name • Talbot Baines Reed
... dancers warming to their work, till his bow moved so rapidly over the strings of his fiddle, and his arm and his head gave such eccentric jerks, that I half expected at any moment to see the one fly off at a tangent and the other come bounding into the middle of the room. Larry and I kept on one side, trying to look greatly interested with the performance, while we managed to have a few words now and then with some of the men, who were either seated on the benches or standing against the wall. Among them were ...
— Paddy Finn • W. H. G. Kingston
... explanation of his conduct. To abandon his bride on the day of his marriage—to abandon his high official position as governor of this State on the day of his inauguration, and without giving any living creature a hint of his intention, to fly off at a tangent and go to the Indian country and become a missionary to those red devils, and be massacred for his pains—it was the work of a raving maniac. But what drove him mad? Surely it was not his high elevation that turned his head, for if it had been, his madness would never have taken this particular ...
— For Woman's Love • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth
... PHLOGISTON. Newton, suspecting that the influence of the earth's attraction, gravity, may extend as far as the moon, and be the force that causes her to revolve in her orbit round the earth, calculated that, by her motion in her orbit, she was deflected from the tangent thirteen feet every minute; but, by ascertaining the space through which bodies would fall in one minute at the earth's surface, and supposing it to be diminished in the ratio of the inverse square, it appeared that the attraction at the moon's orbit would draw a body through more than fifteen feet. ...
— History of the Conflict Between Religion and Science • John William Draper
... it was perhaps the philosophic breadth of view with which he regarded his subject at any time, and the desire of getting to the bottom of each subsidiary problem arising from it, that made him for many years seem constantly to spring aside from his own subject, to fly off at a tangent from the line in which he was assured of unrivalled success did he but devote to it his undivided powers. But he was prepared to endure the charge of desultoriness with equanimity. In part, he was ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 1 • Leonard Huxley
... a lesson in riding. So soon, therefore, as Galors was upon him, Prosper slid his left foot from the stirrup and slipt round his horse almost to the belly, clinging with his shield arm to the bow of the saddle. The spear struck his shield at a tangent and glanced off. It was a bad miss for Galors, since horse and man drove down the incline and were floundering in the brook before they could stay. Prosper whipped round to see Galors mired, was close on his quarter and had cut through the shank of the ...
— The Forest Lovers • Maurice Hewlett
... and none had the ordinary heroism to intervene, and I with ever increasing rapidity was borne helplessly down the declivity towards the gates of Hyde Park Corner, when, by the benevolence of Providence, the anterior wheel ran under a railing, and I flew off like a tangent into the comparative ...
— Baboo Jabberjee, B.A. • F. Anstey
... itself that he saw out of the corners of his eyes. It was the shadow that had lit upon the wife the year before, happily to lift forever; now it was settling upon the husband; and it rested with Langholm—if it did rest with him—and how could he be sure? His mind was off at a tangent. He was not listening to Steel; without ceremony ...
— The Shadow of the Rope • E. W. Hornung
... to run off at a tangent and forsake our ostensible subject, pretty Poll, altogether, I must just pause for one moment more to answer an objection which I know has been trembling on the tip of your tongue any time the last five minutes. You've been waiting till you could get a word in edgeways to give me ...
— Science in Arcady • Grant Allen |
