Word: taut
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...While there, Nagare was entranced by an aging master swordsmith, who ritualistically tempered keen blades for samurai swords, as good for beholding as for beheading. For four years, Nagare took classes at night in order to devote days as an apprentice to the old swordsmith, learning lessons about the taut contours and precision polish that eventually cropped up in his sculpture...
...Collector, by John Fowles. A taut thriller about a dour young man who spots the girl of his clouded dreams-and sets about getting her with a chloroformed gag, a getaway truck, and a cottage in the country that has a priest's hole in the cellar...
...Connecticut hilltop five miles northwest of Hartford, there rose an office building of such beauty that the American Institute of Architects labeled it one of the "Ten Buildings in America's future." Made of steel, glass and aluminum, the Connecticut General Life Insurance Co. head quarters combined the taut discipline of Mies van der Robe's masterpieces with grace notes-inner courtyards, reflecting pools, broad promenades-as old as the most ancient palaces. Now, perhaps to their dismay, the officers and employees of Connecticut General can look out their windows and see on a neighboring knoll...
...most influenced by Reinhold Niebuhr and Pat Boone, the style of The Combat Leader's Field Guide is derived primarily from Ernest Hemingway. Consider this passage from a section on probing for mines: "Echelon men 15 to 25 M to minimize casualties." This tone of taut realism is characteristic of the book. Its author, also anonymous, gives these instructions for testing for the presence of poison gas: "Nerve agents being quick killers, make test with detectors, then have 2 or 3 men unmask for 5 min.... If no symptoms, unmask...
...muscular, McKinley plays tennis with an astounding lack of grace. He leaps, he lunges, he scrambles, he slides, he falls, he dives, he skins his elbows and knees, and he flails at the ball as if he were clubbing a rat. His nerves are as taut as the strings of his racket. "Oh, Charley, you missed that one," he hollers after a bad shot, and he drew a four-month suspension from the U.S. Lawn Tennis Association when he angrily heaved his racket into the stands during a 1960 Davis Cup match in Australia. In 1961 McKinley fought...