Talk:slope

Pejorative

I almost didn't include the pejorative sense. It seems to be (thankfully) falling from use, except on lists of ethnic slurs that everyone knows but few use. Personally, I had never been exactly sure whom it was aimed at and had no great desire to find out.

However, since it turns up from time to time, it seems best to go ahead and document it. I doubt many people will be trolling through Wiktionary looking for new ways to offend people, and if someone is, I'm not sure we can help them.

On the other hand, it was nice to try to capture the usage as in "Fat Charlie the archangel sloped into the room." I hope I've come close. -dmh 04:30, 29 Aug 2004 (UTC)

Mathematics

It's been a while since high school. The primary usage of slope in math classes refers to the slope of a line, as in "slope-intercept form." It is also extended to mean the slope of the tangent to a curve. This is the informal notion that formalized by the derivative, but it was incorrect to define slope as first derivative. Slope is an intuitive notion regarding graphs of functions, while derivative is a formally defined concpet about functions themselves. It's common for introductory calculus courses to use slope as a lead-in to derivative. After a bit of googling to confirm usage, I've fixed the definitions to reflect this distinction. -dmh 18:22, 31 Aug 2004 (UTC)

Capote: a sloping face

i´m not quite sure in which way truman capote uses the term 'sloping' to refer to the face of the character joe bell (breakfast at tiffany´s).

To decamp, disappear

Chambers 1908 has an intransitive verb sense "(slang) to decamp, disappear"; perhaps just confusion over "slope off", "slope in" etc. which we already cover with "try to move surreptitiously". Equinox ◑ 23:50, 21 December 2019 (UTC)

transitive : take something up or down

Transitive :   to make something rise or descend gradually
We had a landscaper slope the path through our yard.

--Backinstadiums (talk) 16:23, 17 October 2020 (UTC)