Word: customs
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When times are hard tribal custom compels the Yalalteca to form what are known as Goosons. Twenty-five men declare themselves a gooson, and every week for 25 weeks they each drop two pesos in the "gooson pot." The first week the pot is given to him who is voted the most needy. Next week it goes to another man, the next most needy. When the 25 weeks are up each man has paid in and taken out of the gooson 50 pesos, but, in effect, a loan without interest has been made to each, each loan, proportionate in time...
...apparently a custom in Philadelphia not only to discover that ballots cast for an opponent of the machine are invalid or have been discreetly mislaid in the counting, but to cast votes freely for those who have for some reason or other been unable to come to the polls at all. A Dartmouth undergraduate coming down to Philadelphia for Thanksgiving lamented that he had not been able to get down before to vote for Wilson, only to discover that he had voted for Vare after all. Cases of this sort are multiplying as the investigation of the Committee of Seventy...
Technically, membership on the Governing Board of the Union is of one year's duration, but reappointment of all the members by the president of the Board has been the custom for several years...
...derivation of one old American custom, the avoidance of igniting three cigarettes with one match, is attributed by Professor Tozzer to two possible sources. According to one belief, the Roer sharpshooters are responsible for this eccentricity. In 1900, the British "Tommics" discovered that two cigarettes might be lighted on one fuse but that if time was taken for a third, latalities followed...
...personal facilities the most remarkable is perhaps that of always donning in left shoes first. The custom among athletes of not wearing new equipment on game days is also observed by many students...