Word: habit
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Latin abbreviations hardly amount to an effective attack on the problem of scholarly gobbledygook. Perhaps not, but Van Leunen's strictures may spur a few professors and scholars into reflection. The practice of footnoting every phrase or idea that does not fit into the text quickly be comes habit-forming.5 So do many of the tics that help make so much academic writing so impenetrable. Such habits should be broken...
...Novelist Carol Spearin Mc-Cauley notes in her book Computers and Creativity (Praeger) that the well-programmed computer is freed from "the confines of English grammar, syntax and common usage ... The machine's lack of shame, so to speak, frees it to express many things that a writer, by habit used to excluding or censoring the ungrammatical, awkward or ambiguous, would not consider." Marie Boroff, an English professor at Yale, acted as muse to a computer that produced these near-erotic lines...
...neighborhood where spending vast sums quickly is a habit of nobility, the Saudis and Iranians are truly princes, if not kings. There is the story about the two Saudi princesses who, with their bodyguard, arrived late one Friday demanding to get in touch with the Bank of America, though the bank was closed. Soon, however, the bank delivered, in a special car, an envelope containing $200,000?shopping money for Saturday. Another Saudi princess recently walked into Giorgio, picked up $30,000 worth of dresses in a couple of hours, then with a flourish gave the owner's wife...
...passes would be dropped, quarterbacks sacked, or egregiously erroneous calls made by officials. Milder side effects include the opening of phantom beer cans and hurriedly placed phone calls to bookies for a nonexistent point spread. After a six-month diet of football, the American public must shake a national habit, and the transition is not easy. In the home of the Super Bowl Champion Dallas Cowboys, for example, police report more than twice the daily average of violent assaults on the Sunday after the football season ends. Spats between spouses can take a nasty turn. Old scores are apparently settled...
...paying my way through medical school and I had to do something to earn a lot of money fast," Crichton said in explanation of his habit of writing novels while in medical school...