Word: habit
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Americans kicking the habit? Health risks and social pressures are important turnoffs, say researchers at the Centers for Disease Control. Forty- four states and the District of Columbia now restrict smoking in public places, and many non-smokers are no longer shy about telling friends and co- workers to snuff it. But the biggest factor may be sticker shock. A pack of < cigarettes went for 23 cents in 1955; the average price last year...
...most of them are old enough to have outgrown cocaine, or at least to have resolved to limit serious drugs to weekends and saint's days. But when Jeff, Russell's star first novelist, arrives at a bash with a 19-year-old model and a heroin habit, eyebrows are raised. Middle age is still a laughable rumor, but in a distant and abstract way, doom is understood to exist...
...megabucks from a crime-fighting fund, no judge is likely to be lenient. Last week former police chief William Hart was convicted of stealing $2.6 million dollars from his department, in part to procure lavish gifts for his three mistresses. More money bankrolled a $1,000-a-week lottery habit and renovations on a Candadian vacation cottage. During the TV movie-like trial, an ex-police officer reported seeing $20,000 fall out of a cracked ceiling in Hart's house. The former chief's escapades could land him a 26-year prison sentence...
...cigar's lineage goes all the way back to Christopher Columbus, whose sailors took a liking to West Indian tobacco, rolled into palm or maize leaf, which they then took back home. Spanish nobles picked up the habit, and merchants spread it to the rest of Europe. By some accounts, Spain took more wealth out of the New World in tobacco than in gold and silver. In the American colonies, the cigar became a symbol of winner-take-all capitalism and flinty frontier grit...
Secure as they are among their own kind, cigar worshippers must suffer in a world increasingly hostile to their habit. Even if you're smoking a good cigar, observes Dunhill executive Dickson Farrington, "you can't walk into a store in New York off the street or get into a cab. I've heard about company presidents whose wives won't let them smoke at home, so they volunteer to walk the dog." The standoff probably suits both sides. Endangered male traditions continue to endure behind closed doors, allowing the rest of the world to breathe easier...