Word: habit
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Helms has never lost an election. The first victory was in 1957, when he ran for Raleigh city council and became its most conservative voice. "On occasion," a newspaper said, Helms "dressed down the mayor and other council members he was at odds with." Stridency became an early political habit...
...vicious until he's been to a good school"). He was homosexual, but neither Saki nor Langguth goes in for soul searching about the love that once dared not speak its name. Saki, in fact, never mentioned it. His sister merely refers to his habit of sharing digs with young men as "chumming." In the biographer's view, however, being a prey to lusts that could have landed him in jail helped make Munro an outsider. Early on the aunts taught him to hate people like themselves, who were unkind to animals and children, and to see lying...
Lately, I have a new habit. Baskin-Robbins' 31 Karat Bars...
...earthshaking. The danger of misunderstanding increases dramatically when even the most elementary signals are used by people in different cultures. The happiest of overt American signals, the circled thumb and index finger, unless accompanied by a smile, amounts to an insult in France. The innocent American habit of propping a foot on a table or crossing a leg in figure-four style could cause hard feelings among Arabs, to whom the showing of a shoe sole is offensive...
Sooner or later, for any word lover, the human habit of wordless signaling leads to a simple question for which there is perhaps only a complex answer. The question is why has language, given its unique power to convey thought or feeling or almost anything else in the human realm, fallen so short as a practical social tool for man. The answer is that it has not. Instead, the human creature has fallen short as a user of language, employing it so duplicitously that even in ancient times the wise advised that people should be judged not by what they...