Word: zipper
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Recall Jesus' encounter with the wealthy young fellow who claimed exemplary zeal in the zipper department. He had followed the Ten Commandments to the letter, so was he entitled to eternal life? No, was the unambiguous answer; the next step was to "go and sell that thou hast, and give to the poor." Jesus then offered his famous observation on camels and needles and how futile it is for rich folks to try to wriggle their way into heaven...
...much of the reason why. In four terms as Governor, Edwards, who was tried twice for fraud and racketeering but never convicted, who ran up huge gambling debts while Governor and who squired so many young women while still in his first marriage that he was dubbed "the Silver Zipper," has made Baton Rouge the undisputed capital of rascally political folklore...
...that end, one clever madrileno revised a "KKK" graffito by changing the first K to a Y and consequently rendering the Invisible Empire as YKK, the international zipper concern. The sole defacement of one spiffy Barcelona metro stop declares, "!NAZIS NO!" In the United States we face racial and ethnic problems of our own, but most Americans, I think, avoid responding to far-right sentiment not because they agree with it but because they consider it simply too marginal to merit any attention. Either politically mainstream Spaniards like to vandalize subways, or the sentiment they observe seems to them...
...MOST DINNER FORKS HAVE FOUR tines? How did the zipper come about? Henry Petroski, the inquisitive engineering professor from Duke who gave us a history of The Pencil (it's more interesting than you would imagine), provides the answers in a lively new treatise on design called THE EVOLUTION OF USEFUL THINGS (Knopf; $24). In a lifetime, notes the author, the average adult will encounter 20,000 or more everyday objects, most of which are taken for granted. Petroski argues that form follows failure rather than function, meaning that the inadequacies of existing things have inspired inventors...
...Zipper...