Word: habited
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Force of Habit." Despite periodic warnings, the White House has been slowly falling to pieces for years. The wood construction of the first floor had been replaced with concrete and steel during Teddy Roosevelt's administration. The third floor had been similarly rebuilt in 1927. But the timbers of the second floor, where Presidents and their families live, had been left unchanged - a fact which prompted Franklin Roosevelt to install a canvas chute, down which he could have plummeted to the lawn, if fire broke...
...second floor, said Public Buildings Commissioner W. Englebert Reynolds, stays up only "by force of habit." Some of its beams carry ten times their normal stress. The marble grand staircase is in danger of collapse. The heavy (70 Ibs. to the square foot) frescoed ceiling of the East Room has a six-inch sag, had to be shored up with timbers to prevent its caving...
Rouault has a habit of keeping his paintings locked up in his studio for years on end, signing them only when he is sure he cannot improve them by so much as a single stroke of the brush. He thinks of himself as a misunderstood traditionalist in art (his training was both academic and thorough), and he has been heard to complain that the younger modern painters "don't begin at the beginning...
Strictly speaking (an unusual habit for Vag), he had been an auditor for the past four years. He had taken a few notes, clipped some campaign speeches and studded his lapel with a button or two. But he had written no Congressmen, signed no petitions. For the most part, he had only sat and listened, a government auditor with his ear miles off the ground...
Mann's habit of interspersing long, solemn, gratuitous essays on culture, humanism, the German temperament and other intellectual matters throughout his story puts too many distractions between Adrian and the reader. But it is also true that some of the most brilliant writing in Faustus comes in these unexpected asides. The section describing Adrian's deal with the Devil (he sells himself body & soul for 24 years of creative greatness) is a tour de force-translated from archaic German into archaic English-that is a unique reading experience in or out of context. So is the subtle, near...