14-letter words containing k, a, c, h, n
- lake neuchâtel — a lake in W Switzerland: the largest lake wholly in Switzerland. Area: 216 sq km (83 sq miles)
- laughing stock — object of others' amusement
- laughingstocks — Plural form of laughingstock.
- make the scene — the place where some action or event occurs: He returned to the scene of the murder.
- marginal hacks — (humour) Margaret Jacks Hall, a building into which the Stanford AI Lab was moved near the beginning of the 1980s (from the D.C. Power Lab).
- marking scheme — a plan or guidelines used in the marking of school children's or students' written work by teaching staff
- mashie niblick — a club with an iron head whose face has more slope than a mashie but less slope than a pitcher.
- on the back of — If you say that one thing happens on the back of another thing, you mean that it happens after that other thing and in addition to it.
- park chung hee — 1917–79, South Korean politician: president 1963–79 (assassinated).
- pink champagne — a sparkling white wine, especially of the Champagne district of France, colored slightly by the grape skins during fermentation or the addition of a small amount of red wine just before the second fermentation.
- recklinghausen — a city in NW Rhine-Westphalia, in Germany.
- rock mechanics — the study of the mechanical behaviour of rocks, esp their strength, elasticity, permeability, porosity, density, and reaction to stress
- schumann-heink — Ernestine, 1861–1936, U.S. contralto, born in Bohemia.
- 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.
- stock exchange — a building or place where stocks and other securities are bought and sold.
- tacking stitch — a long, loose, temporary stitch used in dressmaking, etc
- take the count — to be unable to continue after a count of ten
- thick and fast — If things happen thick and fast, they happen very quickly and in large numbers.
- thick and thin — all manner of difficulties
- ticket machine — automated ticket dispenser
- to change tack — If you change tack or try a different tack, you try a different method for dealing with a situation.
- track lighting — lighting for a room or other area in which individual spotlight fixtures are attached along a narrow, wall- or ceiling-mounted metal track through which current is conducted, permitting flexible positioning of the lights.