Word: leatherizing
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...Swedish engineer who had lost four inches and was slowly shrinking back to boyhood height. So brittle had his bones become that once when he bent to pick up a heavy weight he heard his spine crack. To bolster up his telescoped vertebrae doctors had tried three different leather corsets, three fabric corsets with iron stays, as well as heavy doses of Vitamin D, calcium, and ground eggshells. Dr. Meulengracht found that the patient had always had sufficient calcium in his diet, but that apparently little of it had been absorbed for many years. No textbook diagnosis explained his case...
SCENE FOUR. The hard leather toe meets the oval pigskin an instant after the whistle blows. Standing on the five-yard line, he watches the course of the ball through the air towards him. Swiftly it rises until it seems to be higher than the rim of the stadium behind it up and up in a graceful are. His eyes glue themselves to this careening brown speck. He remains motionless, staring at it in fascination like one hypnotized. . . . This is a game, old boy; it has started now. Forget that hollow stomach feeling. This is a football...
...back as the 12th Century, England imported the best leather from Cordova, Spain, and by the time Chaucer wrote his Canterbury Tales it was natural for an English shoemaker of standing who used the best Cordovan leather to be called a "cordewaner." Later the word became "cordwainer...
...industrial Revolution inspired cordwaining Chamberlains to leave London and leather, start making screws in Birmingham in the Midlands, which was for them like having taken a Covered Wagon in dangerous search of Opportunity. In 1854, at the age of 18, the present Prime Minister's father Joseph Chamberlain moved from London to Birmingham to represent the family's new business interests there and before he was half through his bold career he had made Birmingham what civic experts now recognize as "the first great municipality with an integrated and fully modern government...
...thought and kaleidoscopic memories wafted their feather-like way through his brain, his gaze drifted around the many walls which encircle his new penthouse cubicle. Before him the desk, the calendar, the typewriter. Well enough; they had been so in the past. And there was the Falstaffian old leather Morris chair with its spinster companion, the ever slightly drunken bridge lamp, leaning confidentially over its shoulder--looking the same as ever. But will the old combination still breed the same pleasant spawn of thoughts, the Vagabond wondered? Could they still whisper the same mental innuendoes of Donne when he thought...