Word: customs
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...disturbed by the idea of depriving a man of the right to sell his property to anyone he likes. It is an idea that appears to go against the American grain; but the fact is that the concept of unassailable property rights has little support in law or custom...
Whatever the time, place or local custom, nearly all weddings exert the same powerful tug: they draw all but the young back through the years to luxuriate, if only briefly, in their own memories. Last week millions of Americans took this trip to reverie, propelled by the nationalized nuptials of Luci Baines Johnson, the first daughter of an incumbent President to marry in 31 years, and Patrick John Nugent, the boy from Waukegan, Ill., who brashly wooed...
...FOOD. The custom of three full meals a day has been established only since 1890. Anglo-Saxon tradition knew only two meals-breakfast and dinner-and in the 16th century, dinner was eaten at 11 a.m. While discussing diets, the rabbi rejects the notion that the Jewish and Moslem prohibition against pork started because of fear of food poisoning. The pig was taboo from earliest times because it was worshiped by primitive peoples who also sacrificed it to their idols and ate it in sacred meals. This made Jews, in their passion for monotheism, reject...
...concubines to bind her feet in a faunlike configuration and dance among the petals of a giant golden lotus. The emperor's concubine, if Chinese tradition is correct, was the Judas deer who led millions of Chinese women down a thousand-year trail of torture. The cruel custom of footbinding spread rapidly from court to commons, and continued unabated until Sun Yat-sen's revolution of 1911. After that, it disappeared so rapidly that no Western sociologist investigated a practice that exemplified a sadomasochistic cast of character and civilization and illustrated more drastically than the Ubangi lip what...
South Vietnamese peasants see another side of the Koreans. When refugees come back to a Korean-cleared village, they are likely to find their houses cleaned and repaired, the grass cut, the area sprayed with insecticide. Koreans scrupulously and sensitively follow Oriental custom in their dealings with village elders and the populace as a whole. Two Korean soldiers who raped a Vietnamese woman were summarily shot in front of their company...