The little pluckers fall back into place by gravity."

One day a woman he knew told him the tweezers made splendid eyebrow pluckers.

The children's mothers are tea pluckers and earn as little as £1 for a full day's work.

Many people work on tea farms as pluckers, managers, field maintenance, factory service works, official duties and business.

The tools: a long needle and pluckers.

That's because my house in those guitar-drenched years was filled day and night, but especially night, with transient guitar pluckers.

"So, they're sending computer pluckers these days."

People from Makete District traditionally worked as pluckers on tea plantations of the country.

The children's project in Kaustinen is called Näppärit (roughly "the pluckers").

In birds and animals, plucking is usually carried out by humans, sometimes called pluckers, to the carcass of the subject as part of food preparation.

Magically, half the guitar pluckers pulled sidearms, metamorphosing into plainclothesmen, and captured the thief.

Rock pounders, banjo pluckers, Nashville weepers, talk-show yakkers trying to make everybody feel absolutely terrible.

"We're not chicken pluckers anymore; we're telecommunicators."

Scytalidium dimidiatum (also known as Neofusicoccum mangiferae) causes onychomycosis in tea leaf pluckers.

Tea pluckers at work, some still carry wicker baskets but many now use the less picturesque nylon bags, near Nuwara Eliya.

"Bush spent the whole year making fun of us, and Perot called us chicken pluckers," said Judith Woodward, 29, a high school teacher from Little Rock.

"We're not chicken pluckers anymore; we're telecommunicators," said Gail Berry, a 49-year-old Belfast native and former hairstylist.

Beside him, the master disemboweller polished the edges of his scalpels, gougers, slitters, reamers, renders, crushers, grinders and pluckers.

"We hunted crows on our honeymoon," she said, noting that finely-sharpened crow-quills were used to make the plectra, or pluckers, which give the harpsichord its distinct sound.

There were automated slaughterers, hissing pluckers, whirling skinners and fast-moving egg sorters that would have made Rube Goldberg's head spin.

The performers make free with the text, augmenting the ensemble with rich accompaniments for "pluckers" (as the translated program notes quaintly have it) and even adding bass lines ad libitum.

Then four rows of middle managers and finally the great mass of frontline workers, techs, customer service reps, troubleshooters, antennamen, switchwomen, chicken pluckers and left-handed bottle stretchers.

Or perhaps it was the evening when I passed through Piazza Santa Maria in Trastevere where the same grubby international brigade of guitar pluckers seemed to slouch around the fountain.

They often work as blacksmiths, field hands, pot menders and horse-traders, herders and pluckers of geese and sellers of feathers, junk dealers, gunsmiths, makers of saltpeter and ropes.

Mr. Wise tells us of such figures as the C.I.A. case officer who sold chicken plucking machines as a front until he was beaten by a gang of manual chicken pluckers.