Word: wrenching
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...went to the trunk and found the spare, jack and that wrench thingy that can double as a murder weapon in times of emergency. I had learned how to do this all a while back, but apart from the fact that the jack goes somewhere under the car and is somehow made to lift the car up, I didn't remember much. So I consulted the owner's manual, which is of course written, or rather drawn, in such a way that, whenever possible, coherent sentences are substituted with a shoddy drawing...
...family's Volkswagen bus. The plugs didn't need changing--the van was new. But I was a teenager, and this seemed like a good excuse to get under the hood and learn about How Things Work. A few minutes later (after I'd dropped the socket from the wrench irretrievably into the engine compartment but before my dad taught me a bunch of new and colorful words), I realized that I am a 10-thumbed, butterfingered klutz. Now, when so much as a light bulb burns out in my house, I'm inclined to call...
...this show looking clever and sometimes more than that. His sculpture Fall '91, 1992, is a figure of a woman, 8 ft. high, in a red suit, done with slightly more detail and verisimilitude than a window dummy but with much less than complete lifelikeness. Its effect is to wrench your sense of scale out of kilter: far away, with no real humans near it, it seems close to you; then you realize how big it is, and it takes on the threatening and remote aspect of Big Momma, as though you, the viewer, were no longer an adult...
...sprung a leak through her ceiling. Cholodenko, whose script won the Screenwriting Award at this spring's Sundance Film Festival, is nonetheless more than willing to throw in a few unlikely convolutions--the landlord doesn't answer his phone (apparently for days), Syd has a way with a wrench and some duct tape--to shuttle her protagonist into the upstairs den of depraved sophistication where her story will take...
...House had a sinking feeling when it contemplated clauses that called on the U.N. to respect Iraq's "legitimate concerns relating to national security, sovereignty and dignity." This is diplomatic boilerplate that has been used in other Security Council documents, but in this context it could become another monkey wrench in Saddam's toolbox...