14-letter words containing y, a, k
- 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.
- savanna monkey — any of several common, closely allied long-tailed monkeys of African savannas ranging from Senegal to South Africa, including the green monkey, grivet, tantalus, and vervet, which are sometimes considered subspecies and classified together as Cercopithecus aethiops.
- 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.
- shabby-looking — appearing old and in bad condition
- shankaracharya — a.d. 789?–821? Hindu Vedantist philosopher and teacher.
- siberian husky — one of a Siberian breed of medium-size dogs having a thick, soft coat, raised originally as sled dogs.
- silky anteater — an arboreal, tropical American anteater, Cyclopes didactylus, about the size of a rat, having a prehensile tail, glossy, golden fur, and two toes on each forelimb.
- skiing holiday — a holiday taken (esp to somewhere that it snows) for the purpose of going skiing
- snowflake baby — a baby born following the transfer of a surplus embryo produced during the in-vitro fertilization of one woman to the womb of another woman who was not a cell donor
- sockeye salmon — an important food fish, Oncorhynchus nerka, inhabiting the North Pacific.
- stay-in strike — sit-down strike.
- stony tunguska — one of three rivers in Russia, in central Siberia, that is a tributary of the Yenisei and is 1550 km (960 miles) long
- take away from — detract
- take inventory — count stock or belongings
- take one's way — to go on a journey; travel
- take years off — to make (someone) feel or look much younger
- tank destroyer — a high-speed, self-propelled, armored combat vehicle with antitank cannon.
- 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.
- turkey buzzard — turkey vulture.
- vandyke collar — a wide collar of lace and linen with the edge formed into scallops or deep points.
- voluntary work — unpaid employment for a cause
- walk away from — to outdistance easily; defeat handily
- walk away with — escape
- walkaround pay — extra pay earned by an employee for accompanying an official inspector on a plant tour or around a job site.
- yekaterinoslav — a former name of Dnepropetrovsk.
- yenisei ostyak — Ket.
- yesterday week — a week yesterday; a week ago from yesterday
- yom kippur war — a war that began on Yom Kippur in 1973 with the attack of Israel by Egypt, Syria, and Iraq: Israel recovered most of its initial losses.
- you can't talk — you yourself are guilty of offending in the very matter you are decrying