Word: customs
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...long and bitter war between Tibet and a communist government determined to retain control of the troublesome province, right up to choosing its top religious leaders. For six years, China had insisted on its authority to select the Panchen Lama. But in May, following ancient Tibetan custom and practices, the Dalai Lama announced that he had chosen six-year-old Gedhun Choekyi Nyima as the new Panchen Lama. Officials in Beijing were enraged, and soon thereafter, Nyima disappeared from his home village along with his parents, prompting accusations of a Chinese kidnapping. The communist government declared the Dalai Lama...
However, he related to her that she would have to enter a side door, as this was the custom for female guests, or probably all guests. My niece, a nonconventional undergrad from Wellesley, refused to follow this convention, noting there was a line of others at the side door. Despite entreaties from the member, duly noting he would be fined a significant amount for this breach of parietal rules, he brought her through the front door, and, I understand, was fined...
There was a time when suicides were not permitted ceremonious burial--they were indeed dumped in shallow graves at crossroads, their names pronounced taboo. Surely this custom evolved in part out of a desire to dissuade potential suicides from believing they would be celebrated in death. Today, of course, we realize that there exist' legitimate reasons why an individual might wish to terminate his or her life; we also know that mental illness sometimes induces a person to self-destruct. So, for the most part, we afford the same respects to suicides as we do to anyone else...
...Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, Mark Antony reflects on the numbing cruelties of civil war, a "domestic fury" so dreadful "that mothers shall but smile when they behold/Their infants quartered.../All pity chok'd with custom of fell deeds." Last week, it seemed, the pitilessness that has devoured so much of the former Yugoslavia since 1991 was at last choking itself toward extinction. Strife that has fed on vengeful mythologies and minor cultural differences was succumbing, among many southern Slavs, to a universality of victimhood. Around the western Balkans, sorry droves of refugees could almost have exchanged identities as they toted...
According to a new report on custom publishing on college campuses prepared by O'Donnell and Associates, a Connecticut-based market research firm, compilations of articles and textbook chapters like sourcebooks and course packs are the "only growth area" in textbook publishing...