Orientation meaning: Since alternating current and

Since alternating current and direct current are two forms of electricity that are incompatible despite being equally powerful, the metaphor of A/C vs D/C can express that idea fairly well. It does not require nor exclude a further meaning involving sexual orientation . Thanks — the distinction between bearing, heading, and course makes sense to me, although your definition of heading does not agree with jwpat7's. When I clumsily wrote that I was "looking for two words to correctly assign to these physical components of a vehicle," what I meant was, single-word attributes to distinguish between the direction a vehicle was facing, and the actual direction the vehicle was moving in, voluntarily or not. I think " orientation " might work for the former, but I ... ' Orientation ' meaning 'guidance' or 'adjustment' ("student- orientation week") is another, though hugely more vexed because there actually is a verb 'orientate' meaning to face eastward (both transitively and intrans). It's incorrect to think of pivot as meaning "more like a rotation around the horizontal axis" -- a pivot is a point, not an axis. It's also incorrect to think of spin as meaning "more like [rotation] around the vertical one" -- the axis could have any spatial orientation .