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• n  instrument of torture that crushes the thumb
• n  screw designed to be turned with the thumb and fingers

• This thumbscrew theory is opposed by the fact that Finland's present Government, including President Svinhufvud himself, has been notably anti-Prohibitionist from the start.
• To Nabokov, the ultimate displaced person, the contemporary world increasingly came to appear more barbarous than the thumbscrew age of Cervantes.
• Rome is still Rome, however, ready to enforce the new dogmas with some of the same thumbscrew pressure that it once used to enforce the old.