pivot vs shoehorn

pivot

noun
  • Act of turning on one foot. 

  • An element of a set to be sorted that is chosen as a midpoint, so as to divide the other elements into two groups to be dealt with recursively. 

  • Any of a row of captioned elements used to navigate to subpages, rather like tabs. 

  • A quarterback. 

  • The officer or soldier who simply turns in his place while the company or line moves around him in wheeling. 

  • Something or someone having a paramount significance in a certain situation. 

  • A circle runner. 

  • A shift during a general election in a political candidate's messaging to reflect plans and values more moderate than those advocated during the primary. 

  • A player with responsibility for co-ordinating their team in a particular jam. 

  • An element of a matrix that is used as a focus for row operations, such as dividing the row by the pivot, or adding multiples of the row to other rows making all other values in the pivot column 0. 

  • A pivot table. 

  • A thing on which something turns; specifically a metal pointed pin or short shaft in machinery, such as the end of an axle or spindle. 

verb
  • To shift a political candidate's messaging during a general election to reflect plans and values more moderate than those advocated during the primary. 

  • To turn on an exact spot. 

  • To change the direction of a business, usually in response to changes in the market. 

shoehorn

noun
  • A smooth tool that assists in putting the foot into a shoe, by sliding the heel in after the toe is in place. This reduces discomfort and damage to the back of the shoe. By slipping it into the back of the shoe behind the heel, the user prevents the heel from squashing down the back of the shoe and causing difficulty; instead the heel slides down the smooth shoehorn, which then comes out easily once the foot is in place. 

  • Anything by which a transaction is facilitated; a medium. 

verb
  • To use a shoehorn. 

  • To force (something) into (a tight space); to squeeze (something) into (a schedule, etc); to exert great effort to insert or include (something); to include (something) despite potent reasons not to. 

  • To force some current event into alignment with some (usually unconnected) agenda, especially when it is fallacious. 

How often have the words pivot and shoehorn occurred in a corpus of books? (source: Google Ngram Viewer )