The word 'contortion' is correct and commonly used in written English.
It refers to the act of twisting or bending into a distorted shape. It can also be used to describe a state of being twisted or distorted. Example: The contortionist amazed the audience with her incredible flexibility and ability to contort her body into impossible positions.
OK, if one accepts that contortion, life is looking a little brighter.
Because, long ago in the evolutionary past, an ancestor of humans (and all other vertebrate animals) underwent a contortion that twisted its head around 180° relative to its body, the left side of the brain controls the right side of the body, and vice versa.
From 22 yards, Mr Akhtar launches into the weirdly beautiful contortion that fast bowlers perform to hurl a six-ounce lump of cork and leather at up to 100mph (100mph).
The legal contortion began in December 2011, when the FDA recommended that Plan B One-Step be made available over-the-counter to women of all ages.
Sources close to the prime minister maintain that this latest bloodletting may yet turn out to be the last contortion of the conflict before it succumbs to a negotiated settlement, perhaps with the Jerusalem issues left in abeyance.
Yet General Musharraf's case might have required an especially painful contortion.
In a perverse but characteristic contortion, he is claiming to defend the same 18,000 people whom he has besieged for the past two years.As the jihadist problem has spread, some Arab states appear to be warming to Mr Assad as the lesser evil.
Most irritating of all to voters, Mr Hollande claimed that unemployment would drop by the end of 2013; when this looked absurdly unrealistic, he vowed instead to "invert the trend", a semantic contortion by which he meant stopping the total rising, something that has yet to happen either.
Mr Muralitharan, meanwhile, perfected the doosra, a way of bowling a leg spinner using an off spinner's action a feat of contortion only made possible because of a congenital arm defect.
There's something deliciously sinister about the images and their impression of size and contortion, which Carl sees as "an alternative portrait of a human being whose body becomes a landscape of themselves and plays on the sense of space in which we dwell.
His face seems to crease easily into contortion, but then his emotions have always risen close to the surface.
