Nail

Nail or Nails may refer to:

In biology

Objects

Arts and entertainment

People

Businesses

Nail (unit)

A nail, as a unit of cloth measurement, is generally a sixteenth of a yard or 2¹⁄₄ inches (5.715 cm). The nail was apparently named after the practice of hammering brass nails into the counter at shops where cloth was sold. On the other hand, R D Connor, in The weights and measures of England (p 84) states that the nail was the 16th part of a Roman foot, i.e., digitus or finger, although he provides no reference to support this.Zupko's A dictionary of weights and measures for the British Isles (p 256) states that the nail was originally the distance from the thumbnail to the joint at the base of the thumb, or alternately, from the end of the middle finger to the second joint.

An archaic usage of the term nail is as a sixteenth of a (long) hundredweight for mass, or 1 clove of 7 pound avoirdupois (3.175 kg).

The nail in literature

Thou yard, three-quarters, half-yard, quarter, nail
Thou flea, thou nit, thou winter cricket thou:―
Brav'd in mine own house with a skein of
thread!

Explanation: Katherine and Petruchio are getting married. At the tailor shop, they examine the wedding dress, which is nearly finished. Petruchio is concerned that it has too many frills, wonders what it will cost, and suspects that he has been cheated. Katherine says she likes it, and complains that Petruchio is making a fool of her. The taylor repeats Katherine's words: Sir, she says you're making a fool of her. This is where Petruchio launches into the above-quoted tirade. Monstrous may be a double-entendre for cuckold. The half-yard, quarter and nail were divisions of the yard used in cloth measurement.

Nail (fastener)

In woodworking and construction, a nail is a pin-shaped object of metal (or wood, called a treenail or "trunnel") which is used as a fastener, as a peg to hang something, or sometimes as a decoration. Generally nails have a sharp point on one end and a flattened head on the other, but headless nails are available. Nails are made in a great variety of forms for specialized purposes. The most common is a wire nail. Other types of nails include pins, tacks, brads, and spikes.

Nails are typically driven into the workpiece by a hammer, a pneumatic nail gun, or a small explosive charge or primer. A nail holds materials together by friction in the axial direction and shear strength laterally. The point of the nail is also sometimes bent over or clinched after driving to prevent pulling out.

History

The history of the nail is divided roughly into three distinct periods:

Structure

Structure is an arrangement and organization of interrelated elements in a material object or system, or the object or system so organized. Material structures include man-made objects such as buildings and machines and natural objects such as biological organisms, minerals and chemicals. Abstract structures include data structures in computer science and musical form. Types of structure include a hierarchy (a cascade of one-to-many relationships), a network featuring many-to-many links, or a lattice featuring connections between components that are neighbors in space.

Load-bearing

Buildings, aircraft, skeletons, anthills, beaver dams and salt domes are all examples of load-bearing structures. The results of construction are divided into buildings and non-building structures, and make up the infrastructure of a human society. Built structures are broadly divided by their varying design approaches and standards, into categories including building structures, architectural structures, civil engineering structures and mechanical structures.

Structures (Boulez)

Structures I (1952) and Structures II (1961) are two related works for two pianos, composed by the French composer Pierre Boulez.

History

The first book of Structures was begun in early 1951, as Boulez was completing his orchestral work Polyphonie X, and finished in 1952. It consists of three movements, or "chapters", labelled Ia, Ib, and Ic, composed in the order a, c, b. The first of the second book's two "chapters" was composed in 1956, but chapter 2 was not written until 1961. The second chapter includes three sets of variable elements, which are to be arranged to make a performing version (Häusler 1965, 5). A partial premiere of book 2 was performed by the composer and Yvonne Loriod at the Wigmore Hall, London, in March 1957. This was Boulez's first appearance in the UK as a performer (Griffiths 1973). The same performers gave the premiere of the complete second book, with two different versions of chapter 2, in a chamber-music concert of the Donaueschinger Musiktage on Saturday, 21 October 1961 (Südwestrundfunk n.d.).

Structures (album)

Structures is a compilation album by English progressive house DJ and producer John Digweed, released on 12 July 2010 by Digweed's own label Bedrock Records.

Track listing

References

External links