Crossword clues for touchstone
Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English
The Collaborative International Dictionary
Touchstone \Touch"stone`\, n.
(Min.) Lydian stone; basanite; -- so called because used to test the purity of gold and silver by the streak which is left upon the stone when it is rubbed by the metal. See Basanite.
-
Fig.: Any test or criterion by which the qualities of a thing are tried.
--Hooker.The foregoing doctrine affords us also a touchstone for the trial of spirits.
--South.Irish touchstone (Min.), basalt, the stone which composes the Giant's Causeway.
Douglas Harper's Etymology Dictionary
Wiktionary
n. 1 A stone used to test the quality of gold alloys. 2 A standard of comparison or evaluation.
WordNet
Wikipedia
A touchstone is a small tablet of dark stone such as fieldstone, slate, or lydite, used for assaying precious metal alloys. It has a finely grained surface on which soft metals leave a visible trace.
Touchstone may refer to:
- Touchstone (assaying tool), a stone used to identify precious metals
- Touchstone (metaphor), a means of assaying relative merits of a concept
Touchstone is a fictional character in Shakespeare's play As You Like It. Touchstone is the court jester of Duke Frederick, the usurper's court. Throughout the play he comments on the other characters and thus contributes to a better understanding of the play. Touchstone falls in love with a dull-witted goat girl named Audrey. William, an oafish country boy, makes clumsy attempts to woo her as well, but is driven off by Touchstone, who threatens to kill him "a hundred and fifty ways." Eventually Touchstone marries Audrey, but a prediction is made that the relationship will not last. Audrey doesn't love Touchstone in the real sense of the feeling but only to become a courtly lady. She is a rustic countrywoman. Touchstone is not a self-centered and selfish man, as is shown when he is willing to follow Celia into the forest of Arden for the simple reason as to be a comfort on the journey and as a security too.
Touchstone is thought to be a witty or clever fool, although Rosalind and Celia jokingly say that he is a "natural" fool ("Fortune makes Nature's natural the cutter-off of Nature's wit" and "hath sent this natural for our whetstone"). Often he tries to show off his wit and intelligence by making some wise comments and references.
Touchstone compares himself to Ovid and Jaques likens him to Jove in Ovid's Metamorphoses. The word "touchstone" appears in Book II of the second 1575 edition of Arthur Golding's translation of this work. in which Mercury tricks Battus into revealing the whereabouts of the cattle of Apollo which Mercury himself has stolen and punishes Battus by turning him into a touchstone.
In Shakespeare's Clown, David Wiles suggests that Robert Armin played the part of Touchstone in the first productions of As You Like It (145). The addition of Armin to the Chamberlain's Men in 1599 and the character of Touchstone marked the beginning of a series of court fool characters; these characters differed greatly from earlier Shakespearean fools, typically played by William Kempe, because their humour is mainly derived from the fool's wit and intellect. The earlier fools of this period were often nothing but stooges.
Touchstone is a bimonthly publication of the Fellowship of St. James. It is subtitled A Journal of Mere Christianity, which replaced A Journal of Ecumenical Orthodoxy.
Touchstone (1831–1861) was a British bred Thoroughbred racehorse and a Leading sire in Great Britain & Ireland on four occasions. He was owned and bred by Robert Grosvenor, 1st Marquess of Westminster who bought him for the cheap price, at the time, of only 600 guineas at the insistence of his chief stud groom Mr. Thomas Nutting.
Touchstone are a rock band from the UK. The band was formed by keyboardist Rob Cottingham and guitarist Adam Hodgson in 2003. The name was thought up by Rob, being taken from a lyric in his solo album, Behind The Orchard Tree. Touchstone's music is distributed by Proper Music Distribution.
Touchstone is an album by Chick Corea, released in 1982 through Stretch Records. The album peaked at number nine on Billboard Jazz Albums chart.
Touchstone was a band led by Irish musician Tríona Ní Dhomhnaill of The Bothy Band and Zan McLeod who had worked with singer/songwriter Mike Cross (musician). The band's music was traditional Irish music with some Bluegrass music influence. Based in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, Touchstone was active in the early 1980s touring throughout the United States. They recorded two albums for Green Linnet Records before disbanding in the mid 1980s.
As a metaphor, a touchstone refers to any physical or intellectual measure by which the validity or merit of a concept can be tested. It is similar in use to an acid test, litmus test in politics, or, from a negative perspective, a shibboleth where the criterion is considered by some to be out-of-date. The word was introduced into literary criticism by Matthew Arnold in "the Study of Poetry"(1880) to denote short but distinctive passages, selected from the writings of the greatest poets, which he used to determine the relative value of passages or poems which are compared to them. Arnold proposed this method of evaluation as a corrective for what he called the "fallacious" estimates of poems according to their "historic" importance in the development of literature, or else according to their "personal" appeal to an individual critic.
Usage examples of "touchstone".
Touchstones and Audreys, some genial earnest buffo humour here and there.
Cal, or even poor Jerichau: she had the menstruum as a touchstone of the miraculous.
Should not a magistrate be not merely the best administrator of the law, but the most crafty expounder of the chicanery of his profession, a steel probe to search hearts, a touchstone to try the gold which in each soul is mingled with more or less of alloy?
As we have frequently proved, none of the Lusitanian charts known commit that extraordinary mistake, which may be considered as the touchstone of Lusitano-Germanic maps.
Sports Hall of Fame, he succeeded his father as president of Northern Trusts and was a director of such Winnipeg touchstone companies as Great-West Life and Beaver Lumber.
She knew that I eventually would learn the reason: that the slugs had found out about sex, thus rendering her no longer useful as a touchstone for possessed males.
Both of us had a passion for adorning, then laying bare, our souls, and for testing our minds on every touchstone.
Picaresque pretty obviously referring to the comic-Surrealist tradition of Bay Area avant-gardeists like Peterson & Broughton, since Peterson's Potted Psalm's mother-and- Death stuff and The Cage's cranial-imprisonment and disconnected-eyeball stuff are pretty obvious touchstones in a lot of Himself's more parodic-slapstick productions.
Briney, that's a touchstone for a fair deal that my father taught me: does it feel like a fair deal if it's turned the other way round, mirror image?
This is a particularly significant name, for a touchstone is a hard, flinty rock upon which a soft metal like gold will leave a rubbed-off mark if drawn across it.
For no one since Marra had died really knew what memory meant to Devin d'Asoli: the way in which it had come to be the touchstone of his soul.
With his father and Gil both dead, Corran realized he had begun to rely on Wedge and Tycho to serve as touchstones and moral compasses for him.
On his way home from the pet shop he had stopped at A Clean, Well-Lighted Place for Books because it, too, was a piece of Rachel and he needed a touchstone, but also because he needed to research what he was doing.
It was usually piled with history, Craft, and reference books Geoffrey had pulled from the stacks—books the two men had searched for touchstones to understand Jaenelle's casual but stunning remarks and her sometimes quirky but awesome abilities.
He hadn't realized that his predictability was one of Tersa's touchstones, a means by which she separated the days.