Word: habitant
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...noxious practice of pigeonholing people in narrow racial classifications is a deeply ingrained American habit that predates independence. It began with a desire to enforce firm distinctions between free citizens and slaves. In 1661, for example, Virginia decreed that the legal status of the mother would determine whether a black child was a slave or free. Three years later, Maryland went a step further, declaring that if either of a child's parents was a slave, the child would also be. The purpose of this law, its authors said, was to deter "divers freeborn English women" from marrying black slaves...
...provided the show with delightful spice, then its meat and bones, of course, consisted in the dramatic scenes, excerpted from the plays. The scenes were well-selected, but most of the scenes which involved more than one actor fell prey to the common Shakespeare performance problem of speeding. This habit was especially pernicious in an excerpt from The Comedy of Errors, in which the two actors portraying Antipholus and Dromio rushed and tumbled through their lines so fast that the bawdy jokes (as well as much of the sense of the scene) left the audience in the dust...
...typically silly spread (you know the kind: "In the limo,fresh from a terribly wearisome photo shoot, Tiger Woods says..."). The interviewer, Charles Pierce, quotes him making some notably off-color remarks, and what was worse, it seemed clear from this interview that Tiger was in the habit of cracking jokes about African-Americans. People did not know quite what to make...
Newt Gingrich has reared his head once more. The indebted Speaker of the House tore into federal funding of the arts on Thursday. This is barely news. The Republicans have made a habit of attacking the National Endowment for the Arts, popularly known for supporting allegedly pornographic...
...begin the day with fiction instead of the news had a transforming effect on the news. When 9 o'clock came, force of habit drew me to the shop where the papers arrive, and for the time it took to read them, I would lay aside, say, Wolff's The Rich Brother, a brooding short story about two brothers joined by fear and hatred, or O'Nan's novel The Names of the Dead, about a man who cannot leave the Vietnam War behind...