Word: habit
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...William James called her his "most brilliant woman student." And Gertrude Stein herself, in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, remembers "enjoying her life" and "liking it all." The apparent contradiction may arise from the complexity of her mind, from the habit she had of speaking just any old thought. Robert M. Hutchins, former president of the University of Chicago, recently told an anecdote which bears this out. Apparently Miss Stein and friend Alice B. Toklas went to a dinner party where the conversation turned into a Gertrude monlogue. As the guests were leaving. Miss Toklas said, "Gertrude has said...
...Allegheny, Pennsylvania, February, 1874. The Steins, a prosperous middle-class couple of German-Jewish descent, planned to have five children. If two babies had not died at birth, Gertrude and her brother Leo might never have been born. From patriarch Daniel, Gertrude inherited an intense philosophical streak, a habit of starting what did not get finished, and the love of a good fight. The mother, whom Gertrude called "little" and "sweet" kept a diary reminiscent of her daughter's long-winded and oversimplified writing...
...Gertrude responded immediately to her challenge, she did complain often and loudly. "The intolerance of these New Englanders is overwhelming!" she exploded. "There is never a curve in all their vocabulary." A true Californian, she spoke of "the New England habit of self-repression, the intense self-consciousness, the morbid fear of letting one's self...
Because of Dulles' peculiar administrative habit of running the State Department as a one-man show, no one can completely act as a substitute Secretary carrying out Dulles' policies and attitudes in every respect. Even if there were such a person, an Acting Secretary cannot command the prestige necessary to be an able forceful representative of the United States in the Big Four conference on Germany this spring...
...years ago. He has been aided in his campaign by the testimony of anthropologists, including the late Franz Boas, that the peyote ritual was truly religious, and by the failure of various federal attempts to classify peyote as a narcotic. (Though it may produce a hangover, it is not habit-forming and no more skull-popping than firewater...