Word: britishisms
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...early 20th century. "If I cannot smoke in heaven, then I shall not go," Mark Twain declared. Though the boom was partly lit by the cigar's affordability, they soon become a must-have accessory for debonair gentlemen - men like King Edward VII, who, upon assuming the British throne in 1901, famously announced a break with the smoke-free policies of his mother Queen Victoria by uttering the words: "Gentlemen, you may smoke." Ulysses S. Grant's cigar habit proved his undoing, saddling him with the throat cancer that killed him. And Freud was a chimney: Patients on his couch...
...oldest hangover remedy is to simply keep drinking. The "hair of the dog" method of self-medication has been around since alcohol was invented, although the canine-related term is actually British (it refers to an old folk remedy for a rabid dog bite). Dean Martin recommended it. So did Ernest Hemingway - but then again, he had issues...
...Unless voters learn to identify rulers beyond a family crest or party symbol, the region's leadership crisis will only feed the historical assumption that Asians are somehow ill-equipped to handle democracy. John Stuart Mill, whose writings helped gird modern democratic principles, dismissed the Indians living under British rule as "barbarian," perhaps better suited to despotic rule. The colonial assumption was that Asians were somehow not civilized enough to handle democracy...
...apart from Alex Garland's classic novel The Beach, the books I see most tourists reading in Thailand are the his-and-hers prison memoirs The Damage Done (convicted Australian heroin trafficker Warren Fellows' account of life in Bang Kwang Central Prison) and Forget You Had A Daughter (by British smuggler Sandra Gregory). Wherever you go in the country, you find foreigners sipping cocktails on beautiful white-sand beaches and reading about how horrible the place...
...popular mind, psychopathy is an impossibly broad term that more or less means crazy. But psychologists see it differently and have devoted no shortage of energy to defining just what the condition is. The researcher who may have come closest is psychologist Robert Hare of the University of British Columbia, author of numerous books including Snakes in Suits: When Psychopaths Go to Work...