Word of the Day Thursday, May 15, 2014 vane\ veyn \ , noun; 1. a person who is readily changeable or fickle. 2. weather vane. 3. a blade, plate, sail, etc., in the wheel of a windmill, to be moved by the air. 4. any of a number of blades or plates attached radially to a rotating drum or cylinder, as in a turbine or pump, that move or are moved by a fluid, as steam, water, hot gases, or air. 5. Aerospace . a. any fixed or movable plane surface on the outside of a rocket providing directional control while the rocket is within the atmosphere. b. a similar plane surface located in the exhaust jet of a reaction engine, providing directional control while the engine is firing. 6. Ornithology . the web of a feather. 7. Navigation, Surveying . either of two fixed projections for sighting an alidade or the like. 8. Archery . feather. Quotes: It must be admitted that he was a vane , turning on a pivot finer than those on which statesmen have generally been made to work. -- Anthony Trollope, The Life of Cicero , 1880 Spewing out “chaff,” that reanimated dead metaphor in British English for useless verbiage or humbug, the grinding nonsense of the Office serves merely as a weather vane for the clichéd winds of change. -- Garrett Stewart, Edited by John O. Jordan, “Dickens and Language,” The Cambridge Companion to Charles Dickens , 2001 Origin: Vane is a variant of the word fane , meaning flag; banner. It entered English in the mid-1400s.
Posted on: Thu, 15 May 2014 16:19:33 +0000
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