A device for holding together lesser computing devices. Real computers are held together with duct tape.

Also: a sexual activity many politicians seem to enjoy.

A thumb screw is originally (and, from all its meanings, my personal favourite) a torture device. It was screwed over someone's thumb 'till it slowely broke (duh!).
I was discussing the similarity between a nut-cracker (another good name for a torture device) and a thumb-screw with a friend, when she gave me a strange look. "Don't you know what a thumb-screw is?", I asked. My friend, who took the term too literally, would not stay behind and answered something like "duh! Don't you know what sit on my face is?"

"We all have thumb screws," my friend said, and he was right. "Things we're sensitive about. More sensitive than anything else."

Things about ourselves that we don't like to talk about. Things that hurt when you probe too deeply into roots and causes and meanings. Things that can break us down. These are the thumb screws.

I know her thumb screws well enough. She thinks her childhood was somehow dysfunctional; it wasn't, but she thinks it was. She uses it as an excuse to act like a child. She was eighteen when we dated, but she acted like she was the shy and insecure fourteen-year-old she felt like inside.

She thinks she's not cool, and wants desperately for people to accept her, to think she's cool, and think well of her. So she'll emulate people she thinks are "cool." Even to the point of making the same stupid, infantile mistakes they do. Which, therefore, make her so much more the fool than them.

These are her thumb screws. It's been about a year since we broke up. And I still know all this about her. I know all her thumb screws.

And she doesn't know any of mine.

And I wonder, Is this because she's insensitive? or because I'm cold? Is it because I never opened up, or that she was too self-absorbed to see?

I don't know the answer to this. And this unknowing — this unknowing is my thumb screw.