Other Significance
In aviation, "downwind" refers to a portion of an aircraft's landing pattern, the long side parallel to the runway but flown in the opposite direction is called the downwind leg.
On land, "downwind" is often used to refer to a situation where a point source of air pollution or a scent moves from a point upwind – from the direction of the wind to the point of the observer.
"Downwind" has specific connotations in industrial cities in the English North, where less desirable or expensive housing was often situated to the leeward of steelworks, blast furnaces, mills, or other sources of intense pollution. Hence in some cities it is used as a generic, slang, pejorative and discriminatory term for less wealthy areas or their inhabitants.
Read more about this topic: Windward And Leeward
Famous quotes containing the word significance:
“Of what significance the light of day, if it is not the reflection of an inward dawn?—to what purpose is the veil of night withdrawn, if the morning reveals nothing to the soul? It is merely garish and glaring.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“The hypothesis I wish to advance is that ... the language of morality is in ... grave disorder.... What we possess, if this is true, are the fragments of a conceptual scheme, parts of which now lack those contexts from which their significance derived. We possess indeed simulacra of morality, we continue to use many of the key expressions. But we have—very largely if not entirely—lost our comprehension, both theoretical and practical, of morality.”
—Alasdair Chalmers MacIntyre (b. 1929)