pavior's rammer

The dental assistant was cleaning my teeth, using something called an ultrasound to get rid of the hard stuff that gathers where your ducts make mineral deposits. I asked her if it worked like a pavior's rammer; she said the old ones did, but the new ones use tiny vibrations to shatter the material. I asked if that wasn't indeed like a pavior's rammer, just on an even tinier scale than before. She said sure.

I was just glad to be able to use that phrase in a sentence, something I've been itching to do since I first read it twelve years ago in Dickens's mighty "Bleak House." Pavior's Rammer!

Man, you gotta read that book. It's his best. If you've been looking to settle down with some good August reading that's august reading, put yourself in the lap of the master.