Keys

“ As, in such unusual keys, the black keys must be principally employed, and as they are narrower than the white ones, and therefore less certain as to the striking of them; it is absolutely requisite on the part of the player, that he should keep his hand particularly firm, and somewhat higher than usual over the keys, and employ a very decided touch, in order to acquire the same degree of certainty as on the white keys.
You complain, Miss, that the studying of difficult pieces still costs you much time and labour. ”

“ I’ll make a copy of this drawing, placing the draft for each key on a separate piece [142] of paper. You keep the originals. I’ll leave a draft of key number one with a mechanic that I know, the drawing of number two with a locksmith in another part of the city. In fact, I’d better have the other two keys made in other towns, as their guilds bring workmen together and word might get about of our orders, for these keys are very curious in their design, and will cost a good deal of money.”
“As to that,” says Guy, “I’ve got plenty for the business.” ”

“ This type would study the mailbox for a long time, read and reread the words on the front of it, ponder the safety pin, and peer into the slot to see whether there actually were any keys there--and sometimes, even after all these preliminaries, would ring the bell and hand one of us the key.
One morning I was dusting the Venetian blinds in the office when a plump woman in cerise slacks, with a hat that looked like a ring mold of feathers, minced toward the office door. A key was dangling from her hand, and I moved away from the window to watch her unobserved. ”

“ False keys, and pick-locks, with the addition of a crow bar, are favourite modes of getting into houses, or of making their way through them when the entry is once made. Servant girls, who go of errands at evening, with their keys, should be careful not to leave such a dangerous instrument of robbery behind them; nor to suffer such to be purloined from off the counter of a shop, nor to be snatched from their fingers, in a sort of sport. ”

“ Every key has a history, and there are many kinds of keys - a chamberlain's key, a watch key, Saint Peter's key. We could tell you about all the keys; but now we will only tell about the councilor's gate key.
It had come into being at a locksmith's, but it might well have believed it had been made by a blacksmith, the way the man had worked on it with hammer and file. It was too large for one's trouser pocket, so it had to be put into the overcoat pocket. There it often lay in utter darkness ”

“ The white keys are to be struck on the middle of their anterior broad surfaces, and the black keys pretty close to their nearest extremities or ends.
You must take great care, Miss, that you do not strike any key sideways or obliquely; as, otherwise, a contiguous and wrong key may chance to be touched; and, in music, nothing is worse than playing wrong notes.
While one finger strikes, the other fingers must be kept close to the keys, but always bent, and poised quite freely in the air; for we must not touch any key before the moment in which it is to be struck. ”

“ Again: the scales of the keys of G flat and of F sharp are the same—are played on precisely the same keys of the organ or piano—yet they are placed on different lines and spaces of the staff, and the signature of the first is six flats, and of the second six sharps.
Think of the disheartened state of the victim of this notation when he has learned to read comfortably in one key, and then, taking up a piece of music written in another key, finds that he has all the lines and spaces to relearn! The wonder is that he does not lose his wits altogether. ”

“ “It must be the top drawer,” he reflected. “So she carries the keys in a pocket on the right. All in one bunch on a steel ring.... And there’s one key there, three times as big as all the others, with deep notches; that can’t be the key of the chest of drawers... then there must be some other chest or strong-box... that’s worth knowing. Strong-boxes always have keys like that... but how degrading it all is.” ”

“ So to my office, but missing my key, which I had in my hand just now, makes me very angry and out of order, it being a thing that I hate in others, and more in myself, to be careless of keys, I thinking another not fit to be trusted that leaves a key behind their hole. ”

“ One after another they have closed the heavy iron doors upon him; and now they have him, as it were, bolted in with a lock of a hundred keys, which can never be unlocked without the concurrence of every key; the keys in the hands of a hundred different men, and they scattered to a hundred different and distant places; and they stand musing as to what invention, in all the dominions of mind and matter, can he produced to make the impossibility of his escape more complete than it is.... ”

“ It is from this application of the word to these levers in musical instruments that the term is also used of the parts pressed by the finger in typewriters and in telegraphic instruments.
A key is the insignia of the office of chamberlain in a royal household (see Chamberlain and Lord Chamberlain) . The “power of the keys” (clavium potestas) in ecclesiastical usage represents the authority given by Christ to Peter by the words, “I will give unto thee the keys of the kingdom of heaven” (Matt. xvi. 19) . ”

“ And to recover the actual original key-word may, at times, provide some insight into the habits or mental make-up of the person who selected it, and who may select others like it, or might, conceivably, make use of this same key-word in some other kind of encipherment. If the key is short, it is practically always possible to recover more than one word; but with long keys, we seldom, if ever, recover more than the one word on which the numbers were actually based. ”

“ When all the keys required are made, one or two men who have not been previously initiated are generally called in, and receive their instructions to be ready at a certain hour on the following day to enter the house. ”

“ A safe has been opened and property of great value abstracted from it. It has been opened by means of false keys. Now there are two men who have, from time to time, had possession of the true keys, and thus had the opportunity of making copies of them. When the safe is opened by its rightful owner, the property is gone, and there is found the print of the thumb of one of these two men. That thumb-print was not there when the safe was closed. ”

“ Key, kē, n. an instrument for shutting or opening a lock: that by which something is screwed or turned: the middle stone of an arch: a piece of wood let into another piece crosswise to prevent warping: (mus.) one of the small levers in musical instruments for producing notes: the fundamental note of a piece of music: that which explains a mystery: a book containing answers to exercises, &c.—ns. Key′board, the keys or levers in a piano or organ arranged along a flat board; Key′-bū′gle, a bugle with keys, having a compass of two octaves including semitones.—adjs. Key′-cold (Shak.) ”

“ He must have dropped them there, forgetting them altogether. A find of value and one to save her a deal of trouble: skeleton keys are so exasperatingly slow, particularly when used by inexpert hands. But how to bring herself to make use of these? ”

“ He was particularly anxious that she should enjoy herself thoroughly.
'Here,' he said, 'are the keys of the two large store-rooms, and here is the one that locks up the gold and silver plate which is not in everyday use. This key belongs to the strong-boxes where my gold and silver is kept, this to the caskets containing my jewels; while here you have the master-key which gives admittance to all the apartments. As regards this little key, it is the key of the small room at the end of the long passage on the lower floor. ”

“ One by one they approached the gates and tried every key they possessed. All kinds of keys, latch keys, watch keys, cupboard keys, box keys were tried, but not one could be found that would open the lock. To make matters even more unbearable, the respectable Mayor, to whom, of course, every one looked for direction and advice in their trouble, was of no earthly use whatever [Pg 109] without his scout, upon whom he had so accustomed himself to rely, that he was perfectly helpless without him. ”

“ That nothing is gained by multiplying the keys, will at once be seen when it is considered that the keys, however many there may be, must be struck singly, and time allowed for disposing of each letter as it is indicated. ”

“ In fitting keys to old keyways the key is made too long, and cut off after being driven home. A long key is apt to bend in the driving, hence it is not unusual to support it by holding a second hammer beneath and against it to support it while being driven. ”

“ Next, he examined the bunch of keys, selected one of them, then another, and attempted, in vain, to insert them in the lock:
"There's luck in odd numbers," he muttered, trying a third key. "Victory! This is the right one! Open Sesame, good old Sesame, open!" ”

“ A thousand things which familiarity discovers to be of little value, have power for a time to seize the imagination. A Virginian king, when the Europeans had fixed a lock on his door, was so delighted to find his subjects admitted or excluded with such facility, that it was from morning to evening his whole employment to turn the key. We, among whom locks and keys have been longer in use, are inclined to laugh at this American amusement ”

“ By going through my desk I found a number of keys, mostly trunk keys and one the key to a dog-collar. But late in the afternoon I visited a client of mine who is in the hardware business, and secured quite a selection. One of them was a skeleton key.
He persisted in regarding the matter as a joke, and poked me between the shoulder-blades as I went out.
“If you're arrested with all that hardware on you,” he said, “you'll be held as a first-class burglar. You are equipped to open anything from a can of tomatoes to the missionary box in church.” ”

“ A key is an harmonic system in which there is never any doubt as to which note or triad shall be the final note of music in that system, nor of the relations between that note or chord and the other notes or chords. (In this sense the church modes are either not keys or else they are subtle mixtures of keys.) ”

“ The eighteen keys drawn in one diagram bear names, beginning at the left, D, C, B, A, G, F, F♯, E, D, C, B, A, G, F, E, D, C, B; De Caus states that only half the keyboard is given for want of space; the compass, therefore, probably was as shown, with a few accidentals. ”

“ It must have taken a good five minutes to find the keys in that drawer—and you can see by the way things were left that he must have had to hunt for them—and get the suit-case down and unlock it and lock it and put the keys back and everything. An outsider wouldn’t dare take the risk, Jim. ”

“ Cursor keys move the cursor up, down, left, or right.
2. A file is an electronic version of a letter, report, or other document or collection of data.
3. A control key is what you start holding down to turn a letter or series of letters into commands for your computer. Used with the control key, the letters normally won’t show up in the document you’re typing. Some programs, by the way, may use the control key and an escape key, which could be a way to get from one part of the program to another. Or the escape key may take on functions similar to the control key. ”

“ So I hand you my keyring and provided that you trust me to have actually met and verified all the keys on it, you can take it and add it to your keyring. Now, you meet someone else and you hand the whole ring to him. Bigger and bigger the ring grows, and provided that you trust the next guy in the chain, and he trusts the next guy in his chain and so on, you're pretty secure. ”

“ I tried two of the keys, just as soft as I could; but they seemed to make such a power of racket that I couldn't hardly get my breath I was so scared. They wouldn't turn in the lock, either. Well, without noticing what I was doing, I took hold of the knob, and open comes the door! It warn't locked! ”

“ To prevent, therefore, being involved in this Labyrinth, and to avoid the constant Accumulation of Tools, which would be inevitable, and perhaps ruinous, he adopts the settled Practice of all common Locksmiths; he procures a Set of what they call Pitching Keys, consisting of Two, Three, or Four different kinds of Wards, by which Keys are made all the Locks his Sale requires, be they ever so numerous, during the whole Course of his Life ”

“ If there is no set of either sharps or flats, then the key is either C major or A minor and no code needs to be entered (unless dealing with transposing instruments) . Each key signature has two relative keys, a major key and a minor key. ”

“ And four hundred seventy one highly skilled men, carrying duplicate keys and/or whatever other specialized apparatus and equipment would be necessary, quietly took possession of four hundred seventy one objects, of almost that many shapes and sizes. ”

“ Dbb has taken us back to our starting key called by a different name as was the case when we had twelve sharps. To continue counting four would take us over the same keys called by different names. As was advised in the sharp keys, this research should be continued by the student. If more than fourteen flats are considered, it will be necessary to add triple flats. ”

“ I asked her.”
“Some one might have got into the house without her knowing anything about it. The lock is a very common one. There are plenty of keys that will open it.”
“If we could find some one that saw a person with a bundle go up the steps, that would give us a clew.” ”

“ If for a particular observation the experimenter wishes to present the first three keys at the left end of the keyboard, he pushes back the remaining nine keys so that they cannot be operated and requires the subject to select from the group of three keys the one which on being pressed causes a signal to appear. ”