Word: customs
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This realism is based on the completeness of the creation. Not only is it faithful to human consciousness, but it adheres strictly to its own internal laws, and the reader soon finds himself thumbing the appendix, absorbing lore and custom with enthusiasm which should shame every history teacher...
...Houphouet" is a Baule word meaning "pit for excrement." His father's parents, desperate when their first four children died in infancy, adopted the tribal custom of giving the fifth child a name indicating that he was unloved, unlovable and worthless, to divert the evil spirits that had taken the first four. The local sorcerer recommended Houphouet. "It worked," says Houphouet-Boigny, who. like all his descendants, must forever bear the name which saved his father...
...Spiral. Kubitschek expects his development program to help cure the inflation sickness by making more goods available. The puzzler here is how to finance the government's share of the program and at the same time slow down the currency presses. In the past few years, the government custom of printing new money to meet budget deficits has kept inflation spiraling dizzily. Retail prices have almost doubled within three years, rising faster than wages. Among Brazilian workers, the resulting sag in real wages has brought on a rancorous discontent...
...book, Might Is the Right of Beasts, saying that his late wife Eva "performed more Christian works in one day than all the priests of my country in their entire lives." As for Argentina's new military rulers, Peron scorned them as "men incapable of governing because their custom is to command . . . They end in chaos and . . . fall later, discredited and hated...
Days at the Races. In Los Angeles, granted a divorce after she testified that her estranged husband neglected his family by spending so much time and money on his five cars (a 1924 Maxwell, a custom-built Pinard, a 1952 Willys, a 1953 Morgan, a 1954 Packard), Mrs. Edith Thompson moaned in court: "Your Honor, I'm a sports-car widow...