Word: porousness
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...Lady of the Plaza had fallen into such disrepute that the city turned off the water from her urn. Her porous limestone base had sucked up moisture like blotting paper, had cracked and chipped with each winter's freeze. So dirty and neglected were her face and body that Versifier Arthur Guiterman complained about it in The New Yorker. In an answering rhyme Ralph Pulitzer promised action...
...making his molds, he used a composition of plaster of Paris and special earths, making a far more porous mold than generally used, thus allowing metallic gases to escape, preventing minute bubbles in the metal...
...tossed one into a pot of water, cried: "Notice that it floats. If I should leave it here for a year it would still be floating. In other words we have a brick which is light, one-fifth the weight of an ordinary brick, of high heat-insulating quality, porous, yet resistant to the entrance of water, and of a crushing strength sufficient to support its weight if built into a tower five times the height [1,250 ft.] of the Empire State Building...
...Duprene would have enough uses to warrant its production on a large scale, could be developed to replace natural rubber entirely in case the U. S. supply were shut off. In addition to Duprene, an artificial latex (mother liquid of rubber) was also produced from chloroprene which can impregnate porous materials that real latex cannot penetrate...
...days shalt thou labor and do all thou art able, And on the seventh-holystone the decks and scrape the cable. -Richard Henry Dana Celebrated in song and story of the English-speaking navies and merchant marine is the holystone, a porous slab of sandstone used as an abrasive for keeping wooden decks snow-white.* In the U. S. Navy the holystone has been used since the Government first built ships. Formerly applied by seamen on hands and knees, holystoning is now performed with long-handled implements, mopwise. Nevertheless, there were always corners where the holystone had to be applied...