Word: taut
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...unobtrusive as the voice that sings them: a calico background saying nothing on its own. The guitar and the fiddle and the steel and the piano are the real talkers, but they speak the same language. Betts's guitar riffs play on tension-and-release--building a taut peak like any good sixties guitar (only more delicate), then instead of dropping it letting it shower down intact, shaking leaves off a tree. Everything soars and subsides, but in tiny arcing weblets rather than waves. This is the kind of guitar that can have a conversation with another instrument that...
Every so often cars just fail to come around. Later, on our way out, we will see them being towed down the track, some grotesquely mangled, others strangely untouched by the misfortune that cut short their brief plea for glory. Like taut, shiny beasts they crouch, ready to spring at any moment--except that their insides are shot to hell. As the race progresses the cars become more strung out. The engines now scream shrilly. Carlos Reutemann, who has already won races this year, is leading. Reggazoni, Ferrari's No. 1 driver and hope for the championship, has dropped...
Back home, his first stage play was a resounding success in 1958. Five Finger Exercise was a taut rearrangement of that staple of British drama, the middle-class family turned into a pack of cannibals. His next work, the hit comedy double bill The Private Ear and The Public Eye, did not appear until 1962. He is a slow, easily distracted writer. It took him six years to finish The Royal Hunt...
...wrestlers, whose goal essentially is to pin cattle to the ground in the fastest possible time, engage in hand-to-horn combat with animals four times their size. Calf ropers have developed a special magic with a lasso-to say nothing of training their horses to keep the rope taut while the roper ties together three of the calf s legs...
...Crime Novelist Donald E. Westlake, musing in front of the tube a decade ago, that was no idle question. At the time, Westlake was known mainly as a promising heir to the tough, taut Hammett-Chandler tradition. But suddenly he glimpsed the comic potential of tossing the sand of petty frustrations and human fallibility into the well-oiled machinery of the thriller. Nonviolent, Runyonesque crooks could become the victims, and everyday life the culprit. Getaway cars could stall, crucial phone numbers could slip the mind, a paralyzing snowstorm could fall on the day of a planned bank heist...