Word: touche
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...first problem the two faced was with building inspectors. One city official, for example, approved running the wood siding on a building all the way down to the ground, but then another official made the businessmen change it so that the siding did not touch the earth. An inspector forced Shaw to modify the support system for a gabled roof, but then when he used the same method on another house, a different inspector banned it. Complains Shaw: "The problem is that you can't get mad at a building inspector because you have got to work with those...
...Sholes & Co. arbitrarily dispersed the most frequently used letters-E, T, A, O, N, R, I and S. By 1873, that arrangement had evolved into the current QWERTY keyboard, so named for the first six letters of the upper key row. It was never meant for ease or speed. Touch typing was unheard-of. Early typists (almost all men, called "type-writers") typed with one or two fingers, looking at the keyboards...
...Maltron makes letters easier to hit by tilting the keyboard toward normal hand and body positions. More important, it saves time and motion by dividing keys into more efficient groups: 91% of the most often used letters are on the Maltron "home row," where fingertips are normally placed in touch typing, vs. 51% for the QWERTY. Under the Maltron system, hands rarely have to "hurdle" (i.e., jump upward or sideways so fingers can strike keys). In one comparative study of a million words of copying, the typist's hands had to hurdle 82,000 times on the QWERTY board...
...thin, and his staging occasionally seems more suited to a Greenwich Village opera society. Even Prince's chillingly stark Prologue becomes cheapened in retrospect, as the Sweeney leitmotif is repeated ad nauseum. Ultimately imagination turns to calculated effect--blasting whistles, billowing smoke, showering blood--that titillate, but never deeply touch...
Dave Hale is just a touch worn down, maybe about nine-tenths beaten to a frazzle. But he hangs in there, functioning on pride and coffee. He sells a porcupine for $100, which is about $98.75 more than any porcupine that can't play God Bless America on the musical goose-horns is worth. He sells an ostrich egg for $17, a slink of ferrets for $21 apiece, two ducks for $4 each, and a pregnant monkey named Bonnie for $575. A female African lion cub, not more than 6 in. high, 30 in. long including tail, and only...