Word: taut
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Dates: during 1920-1929
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...left of the curtains waited a middle-aged man in a cutaway coat. He kept pulling out his handkerchief and putting it back again; he fidgeted with his necktie. Clearly he too felt the suspense of this taut interval, this moment so charged with imminent revelations. What mystery waited for exploitation?what exotic, perhaps sinister spectacle would be disclosed upon that curtained dais?. . . The curtains twitched again. Then slowly, awfully, they were drawn back. There, stripped of all covering, backed by a golden screen and brilliantly illuminated from above and below, stood nine Chippendale chairs...
...Significance. As an intellectual feat, the book has few peers. As human literature it contains too much stark psychology to be immortal, though consummate art has converted a mountain of material into a story taut as a humming wire, though the spiritual current conducted has terrific voltage
...trawlers Spray and Foam, groping the Atlantic for 750 miles off the Virginia Capes with a mile of steel cable sagging between them along the ocean floor, last week had a bite. The cable tightened, went taut, snapped. Whatever it had snared was ponderous. Repaired, the cable caught again and soon Diver Fred Neilson of Brooklyn clamped on his helmet, dropped overside like a sinker, 213 feet to the bottom. When he followed his stream of bubbles back up to the surface, he told his comrades that they had indeed found the Merida, a ship sunk 14 years...
...nimble 33, 9 finished- 9 steaming, sweat-gilded, bloody-eyed horses, plastered with mud from cannon-bone to belly, and 9 taut riders bent to their necks. In front was Double Chance, owned by Fred Archer and D. Goold, at 100 to 9. Neither the horse nor its rider, Major J. P. Wilson, an amateur, had ever before ridden the course...
...Poetry. Poet Jeffers is a simple man, himself more an instrument than a user of instruments. Comparable to Walt Whitman in spiritual stature, he sings, as did Whitman, rather by instinct than by a theory of prosody. Much prose, much "barbaric yawp" result; but the stories stretch taut, life quivers, poetry abounds...