prox card
n.— «Sexual assault and other incidents in college dorms have led many schools to control access to these buildings by giving residents a kind of electronic key, often called a prox card, that can also be used to track the comings and goings of individual students. This technology is starting to spread to academic buildings, but daytime access to classrooms is still largely unrestricted.» —“Can We Make Campuses Safer?” by Julie Rawe Time Apr. 16, 2007. (source: Double-Tongued Dictionary)
Further reading
It was a dark and stormy night. So begins the long and increasingly convoluted prose of Edwards Bulwer-Lytton’s best-known novel. Today the annual Bulwer-Lytton Contest asks contestants for fanciful first sentences that are similarly...
Enthusiastic book recommendations! Martha’s savoring the biography of Alexander von Humboldt, the 19th-century explorer, polymath, and naturalist who revolutionized our understanding of nature and predicted the effects of human activity on...