Word: sword
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Energy is a two-edged sword in this connection. Affordable, reliable energy is essential for meeting basic human needs and for powering economic growth. But the energy technologies we use today are responsible for a large share of the biggest environmental threats to human well-being. Energy is responsible for most indoor and outdoor air pollution, most of the acidification of rainfall caused by human activities, most of the oil polluting the seas, most radioactive waste, and much of the environmental burden of toxic trace metals...
...week’s First Chance Dance was stop, slow down, speed up—and that goes for the traffic light-colored outfits and the really, really awkward sex afterwards. Sources say an air of desperation hung over the sea of sex-starved seniors like a slowly descending sword of Damocles. (English majors and Crimson Key geeks, all together now: Phallic symbol.) Since Harvard students couldn’t recognize a social semaphore if it started tickling their genitals, party organizers decreed a red, green, and yellow clothing system, allowing happy couples to flaunt their gloating, we?...
...cadet will not "lie, cheat or steal, nor tolerate those who do," according to West Point's honor code. "Here in everything we do, we talk of honor," says Colonel James Anderson, the master of the sword (director of physical education). When an instructor orders "Cease work" in an exam, cadets literally throw down their pencils, as if they had become instantly hot to the touch. A cadet tennis-squad player who hurls his racquet in a match is off the team...
...horseback, the warlord had to stand out from the anonymous mass of his footsloggers, archers and pikemen. In full rig, cased like a land crab in the formal armor that was designed to protect him against sword cuts and even the slow-flying lead balls of a matchlock, he was a sight: the armor consisted of hundreds of lacquered leather platelets, like fish scales, bound together with silk cord. But his mask, finial, badge and troops' standard, all in one, was the helmet, on whose design much fantasy and theatrical cunning were expended. Because they were an inviting target...
Beneath its distinctive decor, the conspicuous helmet was a cap of riveted metal leaves, weighing up to 11 lbs. and meant to protect a man's skull against sword and club. But was ever a martial object more drenched in symbolic fancy? The helmet had to convey no meaning to the warlord's troops except its own singularity. It was the exact reverse of a "uniform"; it was a portable spectacle. Its shape was not determined by the kind of functional rules that governed the making of a samurai's main emblem, the katana or long sword, whose basic form...