Word: thumbnail
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...majority of the gestures are obscene, many serve to convey respectable and useful information. If, for instance, a man in Saudi Arabia kisses the top of another man's head, it is a sign of apology. In Jordan and three other Arab countries, to flick the right thumbnail against the front teeth means the gesturer has no money or only a little. Bedouins touch their noses three times to show friendship. In Libya, it is customary for men to twist the tips of their forefingers into their cheeks when speaking to beautiful women...
...style to contribute to the tone of the collection. Funeral customs, diplomatic protocol, astrology as a historical phenomenon, and the treatment of children are all bizarre little sidepaths that serious scholars rarely explore, yet their unusualness makes it easy to sustain interest in them for a few pages. His thumbnail sketches of those sorts of topics illustrate an implicit thesis about the way things were in Victorian England, or wherever. These essays don't prove his thesis, but they flesh it out, and they are, as a group, a remarkably pleasant way of presenting supporting evidence. Far pleasanter for example...
...Vidal calls those who rule the U.S., has also produced remarkable exceptions like Eleanor Roosevelt, the subject of one of the finest pieces Vidal has ever written. He turns what is ostensibly a book review (of Joseph Lash's Eleanor and Franklin) into one of the best thumbnail biographies since Lytton Strachey's Eminent Victorians. To Vidal, F.D.R.'s widow is the finest example of the Christian Puritan aristocrat, dedicated to improving the lives of the masses. In recalling her funeral, he concludes with a passage that out of context seems embarrassingly sentimental but actually reveals...
...theory. Spanish Jesuit Josó O'Callaghan, 49, a highly regarded papyrologist at Rome's Pontifical Biblical Institute, offers his finding in the current issue of the institute's quarterly, Biblica, only as a hypothesis. The most important fragment he has studied is a jagged, thumbnail-sized piece of papyrus containing only 17 letters, which cut vertically across five lines of text. His technique for identifying it and other fragments-a standard method that Dead Sea Scroll scholars have used to identify an Exodus fragment, among others-is therefore the rough equivalent of reconstructing prehistoric skeleton from...
Installed at the top of the steering column, the Sniffer consists primarily of a thumbnail-sized gas sensor. Whenever the presence of a potentially combustible gas closes the circuit between a pair of tiny electrodes, a yellow panel light flashes. This indicates that the Sniffer has been offended and will cut the ignition in ten seconds-just enough time, its inventor calculates, to allow the motorist to pull off the road...