screw

Landlords have stood behind this verb for centuries. Jonathan Swift in 1720 condemns their "screwing and racking" of tenants, and Thorold Rogers in 1884 writes of a landowner who "strove to screw his tenants." It is not slang, and its living idiom is to put the screws on someone. Paired with racking, it belongs to the vocabulary of pressure applied until something gives.

The face is its natural object, and into names what the face becomes. John Dryden's Don Sebastian (1690) has a man screw his face into a hardened smile. The pattern still holds: people screw their faces into a grin, a frown or a grimace. Twist is the plainer word, and writhe describes the body rather than the features.

Here the act becomes the person, as in Somerset Maugham's The Razor's Edge (1944): "he's a good screw." Its usual frame is dismissive, as in just another screw. That makes it more wounding than the noun for the act, because it reduces a person to their usefulness. The same register warning applies, only more sharply.

Prisoners' slang, and it keeps the prisoner's point of view. The screws are the people on the other side of the door, as Reginald Kray describes them in A Way of Life (2000). The word is derogatory, so it belongs in dialogue or in accounts of prison life. A neutral report says guard or prison officer. It usually appears in the plural, naming the staff as a body.

Snooker and billiards treat it as an amount rather than a single thing. A player puts screw on the cue ball, using plenty of it or just a little, never "a screw." It is the spin that brings the white back toward the player. The verb screw back names the shot that applies it.

At the table, the verb nearly always comes with back. A player screws back, or screws the white back, and the object can sit between the verb and the particle. Where the noun is the spin itself, this is the shot that produces it.

Football commentary usually adds a direction: the ball is screwed wide, high, or out of play. In a BBC match report of 2011, Rooney "screwed an ugly attempt high" into the goalkeeper's arms. The word blames the contact rather than the aim, since the foot met the ball the wrong way.

Mostly a brusque order: Screw! means get out, much like scram. It is dated American slang, but Louis CK still shouts it around 2009 at anyone who doesn't like his routine. Don't confuse it with the dismissive curse. That one takes an object, as in screw them, while this one stands alone.

The name comes from the twist: paper wound shut around a pinch of something. The usual frame is a screw of salt or a screw of tobacco. Before crisps were sold pre-salted, a packet held a screw of salt. Henry Mayhew's The Greatest Plague of Life (1847) lists "3 Screws and a Pipe." The sense is dated, though older readers will still recognize it.

A word for a horse past its use. Siegfried Sassoon still reaches for it in his Sherston memoirs (1937), writing of a pair of "spavined screws." Adjectives tend to pile up around it, such as old, spavined and worn out, though the word already carries the sense of worthlessness. It is dated, and nag is the everyday equivalent.

American college slang of an older day, now dated. It is unusual because it names both the examiner and the ordeal: a professor could be a screw, and so could the session he ran. The matching verb covers what he did to the student. A modern speaker would say a tough grader or a grilling.

The verb that goes with the severe examiner. The instructor screws the student, often on a particular subject, as in screwed him on his Latin. It is dated American college slang. Readers meeting it in older writing should not mistake it for the cheating sense, though the student may have felt much the same.

Old screw is the set phrase. Thackeray's Vanity Fair uses it of Sir Pitt and stops to explain it as "a very stingy, avaricious person." It is derogatory and aimed at someone who squeezes money out of others or will not let it go. The same pressure, seen as an action, is the verb of extorting from tenants.

Late-Victorian slang for pay. Edith Nesbit's narrator in Man-Size in Marble (1887) wonders whether a servant "wants a rise in her screw." Rudyard Kipling plays on the word in 1888: a certain amount of screw is as necessary for a man as for a billiard ball. That line is a pun on the cue-sports spin. The sense is archaic now and suits only period pastiche.

Mathematics borrows the machine's geometry and keeps only two essentials: a line and a pitch. Any displacement of a rigid body can be expressed as turning about an axis while sliding along it. That is the motion of a fastener driven into wood, abstracted from the metal. The pitch ties how far the body slides to how far it turns.

The name rarely stands alone. It usually comes attached to a habitat or a shape, as in sand screw and skeleton screw, the second being a name for Caprella. Outside such compounds, the general word amphipod is clearer for most readers.

A homely name for the ache, and it keeps a fixed shape: always plural, always with the, as in she had the screws in her legs. Treat it like the shivers or the jitters, not as a countable noun, since a screw in the knee reads as hardware. Jacqueline Simpson and Stephen Roud's A Dictionary of English Folklore (2000) gives it in a tale of a wax doll stuck with thorns.