Word: gadget
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...long hours his tax-collector father spent doing sums, a 19-year-old French prodigy named Blaise Pascal made an automatic device that could add or subtract with the turning of little wheels. But the clerks who spent their lives doing calculations in those days viewed Pascal's gadget as a job threat, and it never caught on. A short time later, the German mathematician Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz added the power of multiplication and division. Said he: "It is unworthy of excellent men to lose hours like slaves in the labor of calculations...
Kazan, whose Greek immigrant father was a rug importer, may have shared some of his character's social trepidations as a student at Williams and Yale. His college nickname was Gadge, short for Gadget ("I was small, compact and eccentric"), but there is nothing mechanical in his development of The Anatolian. With humor and affection, as well as a bruised sense of the dark side of immigrant life, he has woven a saga as richly textured as a fine Kirman carpet. Or one of the great old Kazan films, for which The Anatolian would have made fine grist...
...track record of travel that includes a stint in the Peace Corps. Paul Theroux, too, has styled himself in the mold of those American writers who demand consideration of their contribution to the literature of travel. He writes about the world as if a were a marvelously crafted gadget to be pulled apart and played with, something wondrous in all its aspects yet entirely susceptible to the grasp of his imagination...
...plate actually appears to foster to some degree the closing of the palate. Markowitz, who has been using such plates for seven years, says, "I've seen drastically defective palates fill in by 70% to 80% in ten months." Perhaps as a result, children fitted with the gadget seem to develop clearer speech than most cleft-palate youngsters. Says Plastic Surgeon Saul Hoffman, director of the Cleft Palate Center at New York City's Mount Sinai Hospital: "We're all in favor of it. The prosthesis seems to narrow the opening and make surgery easier. We think...
...better pick up a "high explosive squash head" (HESH), which flattens against a tank before it explodes, sending out a shock wave that breaks up machinery and men. The list goes on; arrays of missiles, electronic and chemical nasties sweep over the reader in waves of gadget lust...