AtD translation: camming

[Mike Jing]

Thanks, Laura and Jochen.

I figured it would be a case of verbing the noun "cam" as well, in the
sense that the shape of the hat serves as a kind of cam.

On Sun, Jul 7, 2019 at 3:34 AM Jochen Stremmel <jstremmel at gmail.com> wrote:

> My dictionaries and the www don't tell me anything about camming or cam
> away. When I read it some years ago I understood it probably as a
> colloquial form of "deflecting" or "turning away"; to cam out obviously can
> mean slipping off with a screwdriver.
>
> Am So., 7. Juli 2019 um 08:48 Uhr schrieb Mike Jing <
> gravitys.rainbow.cn at gmail.com>:
>
>> P344.11-21   . . . notably The Phenomenal Dr. Ictibus and His
>> Safe-Deflector Hat. This ingenious piece of headgear was invented to
>> address the classic urban contingency of a heavy steel safe falling from a
>> broken purchase at a high window onto the head of some unlucky pedestrian.
>> “Bearing in mind that any concentrated mass is actually a local distortion
>> of space itself, there happens to be exactly one surface, defined by a
>> metric tensor or let us say equation, registered with the U.S. Patent
>> Office, which, incorporated into a suitable hat design, will take the
>> impact load of any known safe falling from any current altitude,
>> transmitting to the wearer only the most trivial of resultant vectors, a
>> brief tap on the head if that, while camming the safe itself harmlessly
>> away toward the nearest curbside.
>>
>> What does "camming" mean here?
>> --
>> Pynchon-L: https://waste.org/mailman/listinfo/pynchon-l
>>
>