One-Letter Words, a Dictionary (10 page)

L IN PRINT AND PROVERB

1. (phrase)
An “L-shaped bottom” is “what happens when the stock market drops sharply and doesn’t come back up for a long, long time.”
—Dr. John Burkardt

2. (in literature)
“The preyful Princess pierc’d and prick’d a pretty pleasing pricket; Some say a sore, but not a sore, till now made sore with shooting.
The dogs did yell: put
L to sore, then sorel jumps from thicket, or pricket sore,
or else sorel; the people fall a-hooting. If sore be sore, then L to sore makes fifty sores o’sorel: Of one sore I an hundred make by adding but one more L.”
—William Shakespeare,
Love’s Labor’s Lost,
IV.ii.56–61. Wordplay here involves
sorel,
a deer of the third year;
sore,
a deer of the fourth year;
L,
the Roman numeral fifty.

3. (in literature)
“She gazed at me with vacant, drunken composure, standing colt-like on the outer edge of her black-stockinged foot so the ankle was twisted inward in a startling, effortless L.”
—Donna Tartt,
The Secret History

4. (in literature)
“Long lines of women, bent double like inverted capital Ls, work their way slowly across the fields.”
—George Orwell, “Marrakech”

5. (in literature)
“L is the leg and the foot.”
—Victor Hugo, quoted in
ABZ
by Mel Gooding

6.
n.
A written representation of the letter.

7.
n.
A device, such as a printer’s type, for reproducing the letter.

BY RAIL

8.
n.
An elevated railroad,
such as the one in Chicago, Illinois.
The friction of steel wheel flanges grinding against tracks can produce the distinctive ear-piercing screech of an elevated train. It’s been 100 years since Chicago’s “L” made its first circuit of the Loop…. Today, more than 436,000 people ride the “L” every weekday.—The Chicago Tribune Have I still not made my peace with the afternoons of youth when I fled Reality, via the Third Avenue “L,” to get to my little womb off third base at the Polo Grounds?
—J. D. Salinger,
Seymour: An Introduction

ANGULARITY

9.
n.
A right angle.

10.
n.
An extension of a house or building that gives the whole an L shape.
An L of the house where she was born is still standing.—Harper’s Weekly
It was L-shaped and there was a small window high in one of the walls. Light spilled from it in a theatrical beam illuminating whatever was contained in the foot of the L.
—Jeremy Dyson,
Never Trust a Rabbit

11.
n.
Something having the shape of an L.
Separated from the main part of the studio by an
L-shaped piece of furniture.
—Georges Perec,
Life:
A User’s Manual
The place was almost dark even in the middle of a sunny day: a narrow, long, L-shaped room with only one entrance, dim light laboring through its two window-panes, enough to find your way to a table; otherwise, electric mock-candles cast a weak glow on each table, hardly enough to read the menu.
—Reza Ordoubadian, “The Body Who Invaded My Life”
It must be explained here that my cabin had the form of the capital letter L, the door being within the
angle and opening into the short part of the letter.
—Joseph Conrad,
The Secret Sharer

12.
n.
L bar:
a steel beam whose cross-section is L-shaped.

13.
n.
L block:
an L-shaped concrete building block.

14.
n.
L pipe:
a section of pipe bent at a 90-degree angle.

15.
n.
L square:
a carpenter’s ruler which is L-shaped.

16.
n.
L sill:
in carpentry, “a sill used in a building frame. A plate is attached to a basement wall, and an upright header is fixed to the outer edge of the plate, forming an L.”—Dr. John Burkardt

SCIENTIFIC MATTERS

17.
n.
(electronics)
Inductance,
or the quantity involved in the production of an electromotive force in a conductor by means of variations in the current. Inductance is essentially equivalent to inertia (or mass in the context of three-dimensional space).

18.
n.
Kinetic potential.
Also called the “Lagrangian” (after Joseph Lagrange), the kinetic potential of a system is the quantity obtained by subtracting the system’s potential energy from its kinetic energy.

19.
n.
(mathematics)
In linear algebra,
a matrix in which only zeros appear above the diagonal.
L is a lower triangular matrix.
—Marie A. Vitulli, “A Brief History of Linear Algebra and Matrix Theory”

20.
n.
(mechanics)
L head:
a gasoline engine commonly known as a flat-head motor, typical in automobiles manufactured before World War II.

NUMERIC EQUIVALENTS

21.
n.
In the U.K.,
a pound sterling.

22.
n.
A Roman numeral for 50.

23.
n.
The twelfth in a series.

24.
n.
(economics)
Money demand.
The letter L is used to denote money demand because money is the economy’s most liquid asset.
—N. Gregory Mankiw,
Macroeconomics

MISCELLANEOUS

25.
n.
Any spoken sound represented by the letter.
The sound vibration of the consonant L means “ascending light.”
—Joseph E. Rael,
Tracks of Dancing Light: A Native
American Approach to Understanding Your Name
For my nymphet I needed a diminutive with a lyrical lilt to it. One of the most limpid and luminous letters is “L.” The suffix “-ita” has a lot of Latin tenderness, and this I required too. Hence: Lolita.
However, it should not be pronounced as…most
Americans pronounce it: Low-lee-ta, with a heavy, clammy “L” and a long “O.” No, the first syllable should be as in “lollipop,” the “L” liquid and delicate.
—Vladimir Nabokov,
The Annotated Lolita
The password always contained the letter L, which the Japanese had difficulty pronouncing the way an
American would.
—Eugene B. Sledge,
With the Old
Breed: At Peleliu and Okinawa

26.
n.
The twelfth letter of the alphabet.
Then, no doubt, the “l” had been dropped or had been replaced by an “h.”
—Georges Perec,
Life:
A User’s Manual
[A]n Allied fighter plane with a yellow flag on its
cockpit bearing the letter L had circled over Don
Calò’s town; and inside a packet dropped by the pilot—which fell near the town church and was delivered by a villager to the home of Don Calò—was a smaller replica of this yellow L flag.
—Gay Talese,
Unto the Sons

27.
n.
The twelfth section in a piece of music.
Its final climactic statement at letter L…comes as something of a surprise, as the twelve previous versions of this figure, for all their variety of harmonization and orchestration, convey a consistency of expression.
—Timothy L. Jackson,
Sibelius Studies

28.
n.
Something arbitrarily designated L
(e.g., a person, place, or other thing).

29.
n.
Hell, in transliterations of the English Cockney dialect, which drops the h-sound from the word.

30.
n.
An ancient sign indicating the geometric shape of the square according to Herman R. Bangerter,
“Significance of Ancient, Geometric Symbols.”

31.
n.
A source of material included in the New Testament.
When we examine the corpus of Luke, we quickly become aware that there is a significant amount of uniquely Lucan material that appears nowhere else in any gospel. New Testament scholars tend to call this the L source. In the past it was asserted that L represented the material available to Luke other than Mark or Q. Lately, the suggestion has been offered that Luke was himself the creative genius who wrote the L material and that his only external primary sources were Mark and Matthew.
—John Shelby Spong,
Liberating the Gospels: Reading the
Bible with Jewish Eyes