distortion
part of speech
noun (a distortion, distortions; uncountable too); verb distort
meaning for a pupil
1) Distortion is when the shape, sound or picture of something is twisted or stretched so it looks or sounds wrong. tree →
2) A distortion of the truth or facts is a version that changes them so they give a false idea. tree →
3) In music, distortion is a rough, buzzing sound effect used on electric guitars. tree →
sense in the lessons
In science: lenses, curved mirrors and water cause distortion of light (a funhouse mirror, a straw looking bent). In media and politics lessons: a distortion of facts is a warning sign of propaganda or misleading charts. Phrases: a distortion of the truth, sound distortion, image distortion.
examples
- All the other commentaries mentioned above, together with all quotations of other expounders of the same book, contain nothing but a medley of arbitrary, mystical explanations and sophistical distortions of scriptural verses, astrological notions, oriental (Sefer Yetzirah, Kalisch 1877) tree →
- The funhouse mirror caused a funny distortion of our faces. tree →
- The water made a distortion so the pencil looked bent. tree →
- The loud speaker gave the music a crackly distortion. tree →
- Saying I broke it on purpose is a distortion of what happened. tree →
- A graph that does not start at zero can create a distortion. tree →
- The guitarist turned on the distortion pedal. tree →
- Heat over the road made a wobbly distortion in the air. tree →
note
Countable for single cases (a distortion of the facts) and uncountable for the effect (too much distortion). A distortion is not the same as a lie: it can bend true facts. In maths charts, a stretched or cut axis is a classic distortion — read the numbers, not the bar heights.
Trees and pragmatics
Every meaning and example of «distortion» parsed by Mova, each sentence with its dependency tree and frames.