14-letter words containing a, y, c, k
- pyjama cricket — one-day cricket, in which the players wear colourful clothing rather than the traditional whites used in longer forms of the game
- ready reckoner — reckoner (def 2).
- salary bracket — a given range or bracket of salaries within which the amount of pay earned by someone falls
- salt lake city — a state in the W United States. 84,916 sq. mi. (219,930 sq. km). Capital: Salt Lake City. Abbreviation: UT (for use with zip code), Ut.
- scratch monkey — (humour) As in "Before testing or reconfiguring, always mount a scratch monkey", a proverb used to advise caution when dealing with irreplaceable data or devices. Used to refer to any scratch volume hooked to a computer during any risky operation as a replacement for some precious resource or data that might otherwise get trashed. This term preserves the memory of Mabel, the Swimming Wonder Monkey, star of a biological research program at the University of Toronto. Mabel was not (so the legend goes) your ordinary monkey; the university had spent years teaching her how to swim, breathing through a regulator, in order to study the effects of different gas mixtures on her physiology. Mabel suffered an untimely demise one day when a DEC engineer troubleshooting a crash on the program's VAX inadvertently interfered with some custom hardware that was wired to Mabel. It is reported that, after calming down an understandably irate customer sufficiently to ascertain the facts of the matter, a DEC troubleshooter called up the field circus manager responsible and asked him sweetly, "Can you swim?" Not all the consequences to humans were so amusing; the sysop of the machine in question was nearly thrown in jail at the behest of certain clueless droids at the local "humane" society. The moral is clear: When in doubt, always mount a scratch monkey. A corespondent adds: The details you give are somewhat consistent with the version I recall from the Digital "War Stories" notesfile, but the name "Mabel" and the swimming bit were not mentioned, IIRC. Also, there's a very detailed account that claims that three monkies died in the incident, not just one. I believe Eric Postpischil wrote the original story at DEC, so his coming back with a different version leads me to wonder whether there ever was a real Scratch Monkey incident.
- shankaracharya — a.d. 789?–821? Hindu Vedantist philosopher and teacher.
- sockeye salmon — an important food fish, Oncorhynchus nerka, inhabiting the North Pacific.
- treasury stock — outstanding shares of stock reacquired and held by the issuing corporation.
- tuckaway table — a table having a support folding into one plane and a tilting or drop-leaf top.
- vandyke collar — a wide collar of lace and linen with the edge formed into scallops or deep points.
- you can't talk — you yourself are guilty of offending in the very matter you are decrying