Word: combes
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...stare protesters down, but heckling has become rare since World War II. Heckling is most common in Britain, where it is something of an art, designed to test a speaker's combativeness and quickness of wit. Appropriately, the word comes from the Middle English "hekele," to tease or comb flax, or broadly "to tease with questions...
...HECKLE: Essentially evolved from the Midd'e English word hekele (to comb flax or to tease or ruffle hemp). An 1808 Scottish dictionary added the second definition of heckle as "to tease with questions...
...Hollywood as a studio pianist for MGM. One of his major assignments was recording backgrounds for Tom and Jerry cartoons. At first, the constant glissandos of cartoon music put blisters on his knuckles, but a fellow studio pianist, Andre Previn, showed him how to play them with a comb. Meanwhile, Powell pursued his studies in serious music. In 1948 he moved east to study composition with Paul Hindemith at Yale. By 1958, when he was offered a professorship, he was already noted as a deft, if sometimes perplexing, composer for conventional instruments. His final step into machine-made sounds...
...Kookie, Kookie, Lend Me Your Comb...
...staged by the Whitney Museum of American Art have long been considered the U.S. art world's Gallup poll. They attracted the whole spectrum of artistic talent, accurately forecast which schools and techniques were gaining popularity. But because the Whitney is a Manhattan museum with limited funds to comb the nation for prospects, critics have charged that the Annuals reflected the fast-changing Manhattan gallery scene but not the nation at large...