telescoping

English

Verb

telescoping

1. present participle and gerund of telescope

Adjective

telescoping (not comparable)

1. Synonym of telescopable

Noun

telescoping (countable and uncountable, plural telescopings)

1. The act of extending or contracting in the manner of a telescope.
   • 1940 November, H. A. Robinson, “Devices to Reduce Collision Results”, in Railway Magazine, page 580:

     As the word suggests, "telescoping" is the forcing of one vehicle into its immediate neighbour, and is caused by the heavy steel underframe of one coach rising slightly and sliding over the frame of the next, much in the same way that two planks being pushed end to end might suddenly ride one over the other.

   • 2000, Walter Sickert, Anna Gruetzner Robins, Walter Sickert: The Complete Writings on Art, page 507:

     Mr Sadleir's prose style recalls Whistler's at every turn. There are the same terrific and nonchalant telescopings of continents and centuries, and the same honeyed omniscience, kind but firm, and the same want of an innate sense of proportion […]

2. Extending limited data to make up for gaps
   • 1979, Joseph Miller, Kings, Lists, and History in Kasanje - History in Africa, page 67:

     The outstanding feature of the nineteenth-century lists in relation to the modern ones is their incompleteness. This incompleteness might suggest telescoping, […]
     Charges of telescoping and other forms of shortening the roster of former kings in oral cultures perhaps ought in at least some cases to be directed against scholars and others who have compiled such faulty lists […]

3. A telescopic action.

   intermediate stages of telescoping of the parts together

4. (psychology) The temporal displacement of an event in which people perceive recent events as being more remote than they are and distant events as being more recent than they are.

   The telescoping effect is divided into backward telescoping and forward telescoping.

   • 1989 November, David C. Rubin, Alan D. Baddeley, “Telescoping is not time compression: A model”, in Memory & Cognition, volume 17, number 6, →DOI, page 653:

     Here we will show that telescoping is a result of the way the question is asked rather than a result of the compression of time.

   • 2021 October 14, Ferdinand Kosak, Sven Hilbert, “The Passage of Years: Not a Matter of Covert Retrieval of Autobiographical Memories”, in Frontiers in Psychology, volume 12, →DOI:

     Telescoping happens in two directions: While forward telescoping describes the tendency of dating past events too close to the present, backward telescoping describes the opposite effect, that is, dating past events too far to the past.