Word for the day: "nutation"

YouTube link.

I think everyone is familiar with the process documented here, but the title "nutation - vine - speeded up" triggered a lookup.  A search showed I have used the word only once (in a different context) in the life of this blog, in a quote from John Quincy Adams:

“… if the wise and learned philosophers of the elder world, the first observers of nutation and aberration, the discoverers of maddening ether and invisible planets, the inventors of Congreve rockets and shrapnel shells, should find their hearts disposed to enquire what has America done for the benefit of mankind? Let our answer be this: America, with the same voice which spoke herself into existence as a nation, proclaimed to mankind the inextinguishable rights of human nature, and the only lawful foundations of government.

I had to look up the meaning then, and because ten years have passed, I had to look it up again.

Nutation is the bending movements executed by some plant organs, such as stems, leaves, roots, etc., by which the part is inclined successively in various directions. Nutations are due to the unequal rate of growth of different sides of the organ, an inequality which, so far as is known at present (c. 1915), is dependent upon internal (unknown) causes and is not called forth by the action of external stimuli. The word is often used in a broad sense in the phrase nutational movement, to include all the movements in plants caused by growth in contrast to variation movements or movements produced by reversible turgor changes.

It has a slightly different meaning in physics.  Etymology from the Lain for "nodding."