Word: bumps
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Iowa's Finnemore compares the movement of the electrons in a superconductor to a crowd moving across a football field. "If they act as individual particles," he explains, "they will bump into each other and scatter. That's the equivalent of electrical resistance. But suppose someone starts counting cadence, and everyone locks arms and marches in step. Then even if one person falls into a chuckhole, he won't fall because his neighbors hold him up." Thus in a superconductor electrons move unhindered...
Almost no amateur golfers play by the rules. They have come to an accommodation with themselves and one another to bump the ball in the fairways or nonchalant it on the greens. The game most of them play combines croquet with tiddledywinks. But they know the rules. Alerted by the whistle blowers, P.G.A. tour officials penalized Stadler two strokes for innocently "building a stance" with his flat towel and then disqualified him entirely because the scorecard he had signed the day before was now incorrect. Some might say the punishment fit the crime no better than the pants...
...prime indignity for airline customers is to be bumped, or denied a reserved seat, because the carrier has booked too many passengers on a flight. Overbooking is a product of fare wars; because airlines are collecting less per seat, they want to ensure a full load to make a profit. The practice of overbooking crops up in other businesses when managers want to make the most of a prime-time rush of customers. At peak times popular hotels and restaurants sometimes bump customers who show up even modestly late for their reservations...
Appleton's leading citizens are the sort of folks one expects to bump into at a bridge party, a church service, a Rotary Club meeting. They are not the kind of people likely to show up for, say, a seance. Yet, on Oct. 31, the night souls of the dead are said to roam the earth, that is just where a visitor found the chairman of Lawrence University's psychology department, the president of a local construction company, the CEO of a large paper company, the executive director of the county's Outagamie Museum, the city's director of planning...
Whether or not they exist, ghosts, ghouls, and things that go bump in the night have certainly made a ghastly impression on Harvard. And that's something Crimson Key doesn't talk about either...