Word: customs
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...total effect of the U.S. influence has yet to be evaluated. Says one American resident in Tokyo: "They are using us like gunpowder-to blow up the thick walls of old custom." Gunpowder or not, the Western influence, matched by Japan's own singular drive and energy, is giving the country the highest living standard in the Far East. And the living standard in Tokyo is higher than anywhere else in the four main rich and fertile islands of Japan. This, in part, is responsible for Tokyo's spectacular population increase, which now averages about 250,000 annually...
...steered the country sternly back from left to center, the U.S. sent $50 million to start a highway and building boom that has kept Guatemala prosperous. But graft, always present, kept pace with prosperity. The President alone dispensed $1,000,000 a year through the old and perfectly legal custom of confidenciales-a confidential fund that he could spend as he saw fit. With paternal pride, Castillo launched ambitious health-and-education programs, plastering the country with signs urging peasants to "Wash Your Hands Before Eating." To replace Arbenz' helter-skelter expropriation of rich plantations, he started a gradual...
Since they lived in a rainy region where only the toughest relics avoid disintegration, almost nothing would be known about the Olmecs if it had not been for their curious custom of carving in jade and hard stone and burying the carvings. To judge by their figurines, they bound their babies' heads to make them abnormally highbrowed. They probably worshiped a jaguar god, or at least they carved fierce stone images of beasts half man, half jaguar. They also carved monstrous human heads nine feet high with petulant baby faces. They floored their ceremonial rooms with clay tinted...
...society that thinks that by taking men's lives, it improves itself. At the grave, which they have eagerly dug for the customary reward of some snout (tobacco), four prisoners perform a final act reminiscent of the division of spoils on Calvary long ago. It is the prison custom not to send on the condemned man's last letters, but to bury them with him. As they are dropped in the grave, the prisoners grab for them. "Give us them bloody letters," says one. "They're worth money to one of the Sunday papers...
...sooner had he written his ten questions on the blackboard than twelve of his 16 students began following an old Spanish custom by discussing the questions aloud and threshing out their answers. During the whole two hours they peered at one another's papers, passed around notes, kept up a constant chatter. McNaughton begged in vain for silence. When he asked three of the most recalcitrant students to move to other desks, one flatly refused. Finally, the desperate professor implored his interpreter to intervene. Scandalized, the interpreter declared that he could not possibly tell his social superiors...