Word: besom
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Boyer is a lot more easygoing. He knows his scyes (armholes) and his besom (stitched folds) pockets, but he cares little for dogma. He does not fuss about which collar style may be appropriate to a man's face (most, he suggests, are good for all). He provides some lustrous little essays on royal dandies, polyester, loafers and the making of Harris Tweed, which is still turned out by hand, in the Outer Hebrides. The weavers have resisted most new technology, he reports, although they have given up their time-honored method of preparing the yarn for dyeing. Chemicals have...
...become their historian. As he wrote: "I have flown to their rescue-not of their lives or of their race (for they are 'doomed' and must perish), but to the rescue of their looks and their modes, at which the acquisitive world may hurl poison and every besom of destruction, and trample them down and crush them to death; yet, phoenix-like, they may rise ... and live again upon canvas...
...engineering colleagues besom Fair's plunge into College life as a scientific loss. "Since he became 'Mr. Chips' over at Harvard," one former associate complains, "we never see him at our monthly meetings." But Fair has not given up his pre-Dunster occupation; he hopes to have his fourth book, water and Waste Water, ready for publication shortly and in 1950, Fair was the official U.S. representative a meeting of sanitary engineers in Rome...
...lived in a house that hopped on chicken-footed stilts, around which was an iron fence ornamented with skulls. After dark, the eye sockets of the skulls glowed with fire to light her way. Her chariot was a mortar, which she pushed with a pestle, using her besom to erase her singular track. Innocent children were her favorite fare, but once a girl child, who might have been her dinner, foiled her with bread. Fleeing from Baba-Yaga, this miraculous child strewed the forest with crumbs, each of which sprouted a tree, and the trees grew so tall and thick...
There used to be so many burlesque houses on Manhattan's garish 42nd Street that it was virtually one big runway. A decade ago Mayor LaGuardia, who loved to brandish a besom, swept burlesque and all its trimmings right out of New York City; 42nd Street west of Broadway was left with a flea circus and a bereft feeling. Not until The Hat and his pecksniffian License Commissioner Paul Moss left office did there seem any chance to bring the strippers and the privy jokesters back to the boards...