The Describer's Dictionary: A Treasury of Terms & Literary Quotations (4 page)

The Russian defences consisted of a semi-elliptical-shaped fort containing 62 casemates on each of two floors from which heavy guns mounted in the centre could sweep the bay almost at water level. Behind the ellipse, and part of the fort, stood a large horseshoe-shaped work on two floors with casemates armed with heavy guns to flank the landward approaches. In the hills behind lay three round towers, also casemated, their guns commanding the countryside. All the masonry was granite, constructed in polygonal form similar to the method used by the Austrians at Verona.

Anyone climbing the steps stood straight into the sky, and the wind in their clothes and the sky with its scarves of cloud and the trumpet shapes of the trees, made the figures like gay and flimsy dancers cut from paper.

The volcano rises as an isolated and well-formed cone about 3000 m above the floor of the Banda Sea. The perfection of the cone is marred by two very large and one small slump scars on the upper slopes and by fan-shaped slump deposits at corresponding positions at the base of the slope, underwater. Two of the slump scars are subaerial at the top; they have steep, radial side walls and form deep embayments in the small, otherwise circular islands.

Volcanic islands generally are circular or elliptical cones or domes, and it is easy to visualize the influence of their shape upon erosion by imagining simple circular cones that lie in seas without waves and on which rain falls uniformly. The consequent rivers that develop on a cone are radial because the slopes of the cone are radial. The side slopes of the river valleys tend to be relatively constant but the longitudinal slopes are steeper in the headwaters than at the shoreline. Thus the valleys of the radial streams are funnel shaped; they are narrow and shallow at the shoreline and spread into great, deep amphitheaters in the interior.

This square-shaped labyrinth is made entirely of straight lines, which are much easier to scratch than concentric curves.

The great breakthrough, however, was in the development of the medieval Christian labyrinth design. This had eleven rings instead of seven, a characteristic cruciform design, and most significantly, the paths ranged freely through the quadrants, rather than methodically proceeding quarter by quarter in the Roman way. A manuscript in the Vatican dated AD860-2 contains a prototype of this innovatory medieval Christian design, and the tenth-century Montpellier manuscript portrays the design more formally. It was executed in two main forms, circular and octagonal.

Orion is outlined by four bright stars at the corners of an imaginary trapezoid. Within the space defined by these four points, and seeming to draw them together into a pattern, is a row of three stars tilted at an angle—Orion’s belt. Arcing downward from the belt is another group of fainter stars—his sword.

First of all, when you consider the shape of a chickadee’s body, you will notice that it’s round. Whereas a blue jay is elongated, and a nuthatch tapered and slightly flattened, a chickadee is like a little ball. This roundness helps the small bird balance itself in the topsy-turvy positions it assumes while it’s searching for insect eggs on the twigs and outer branches of trees.

Earth flows move slower than debris flows and mudflows. They usually have a spoon-shaped sliding surface with a crescent-shaped cliff at the upper end and a tongue-shaped bulge at the lower end....

PARTICULAR SHAPES
OR LIKENESSES

Ultimately, the valley slopes take on a sigmoidal form with the upper convex slope formed by creep and a lower concave slope formed by wash processes.

If we look through a window at a mass of buildings, or any external objects, and observe that part of the glass to which each object, line, or point, appears opposite, we find that their apparent situation is very different from their real. We find that horizontal lines sometimes appear oblique, or even perpendicular, that circles, in certain situations, look like ellipses, and squares like trapezoids or parallelograms.

Two of the most famous, long landmarks of Manhattan are the Flatiron Building, erected in 1902, and the Times Building (recently remodeled as the Allied Chemical Building), in 1904. Both have odd, trapezoidal floor plans, dictated by the pie-shaped real-estate slices Broadway strews along its diagonal path as it crosses Manhattan avenues, Fifth at Twenty-third, site of the Flatiron, and Seventh at Forty-second, site of the Times. The resulting slenderness of the two buildings, plus the absence of scientific data on wind stresses, caused the New York engineers to take special precautions. Triangular “gusset plates” were inserted as braces, four to each joint of horizontal beam and vertical column.