Word: habit
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...Stage Two, you recognize that this new country, like any other, has its downside. There's the ketchup candy, for instance. Also, Spaniards have a bothersome habit of throwing fruit at you from their window and yelling "Yankee go home, muddafudda!" (really). But in Stage Two you don't get angry, you get concerned. What about American imperialism has angered these vulgar, fruit-throwing Spaniards? Are they mad we stole Antonio Banderas? Seriously, if you want him back, we can have him packed and shipped in under an hour...
...program that helps you stop smoking, the IRS lets you deduct the cost. Smoking-cessation programs can range from $30 to $350 depending on the treatment. But if you choose a patch or nicotine gum, you're outta luck--no deductions for over-the-counter meds. Kicked the habit in the past three years? You could still get a refund by filing an amended tax return...
...fear of male clowns, for example, especially those with heavy rouge on their cheeks that only partly conceals their stubble. Or my nagging suspicion that some short-order cooks really do blow their nose in the soup, and far more often than their customers realize. Also, I have a habit, in public rest rooms, of drying my hands on the inside of my shirt rather than using those wall-mounted dryers, which I am convinced can spread tuberculosis. Finally, last year, for precisely 6 months, 13 days and 7 hours, I was convinced that the oldest of my three dogs...
McCarthy was a gifted minor writer with a penetrating mind and, for all her coldness, considerable charm. She had the treacherous habit of putting real people (friends, enemies, ex-husbands), thinly disguised, into her fiction--a matter, she said, of baking real plums into an imaginary cake. Her unusual compulsion to tell the truth could also be an instrument of vicious distortion. The technique proved lucrative with The Group, her best-selling 1963 novel of her classmates at Vassar and their subsequent lives...
...some point, it becomes a way of life, a habit that's hard to break. One of my best friends has become a sort running joke because she just can't help herself--you name it, she's applied. My roommate sent her, as a joke, an "application" to one of our parties this year. Essay question number two: "We relish the exclusion of less worthy individuals. Please explain why we should forfeit the small portion of joy we would obtain in excluding you from our festivities...