Word: habits
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Dates: during 1880-1889
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...Nassau Lit. has lately tried to introduce the habit of using translations more than is done at present in college papers. It presented to the world in its last number several translations, of very perfect taste and finish. Now taking the Nassau Lit. as the bean ideal of what a college magazine should be, we cannot help thinking that perhaps it is justified in its call for more translations. In the first place, it is not to be presumed that an immature writer whose sole merit is a good command of English, can develop the instant he becomes editor...
...This habit of defaming celebrated men, or institutions is but another example of our human liking for scandal. We are all very glad to hear something deliciously wicked about any prominent person, about Congress, about Yale, Princeton, Columbia, Harvard. It tickles us to learn that others are so depraved: for we seem righteous in comparison. And so long as people take delight in the sins of others, so long will newspapers continue to invent their pleasing little anecdotes about our iniquities. There is no help...
...resident in Massachusetts, - yet but fourteen of her sons are found in the legislature of the state. "A little knowledge is a dangerous thing," and the dangers of incomplete education to-day are shown most clearly in the incompetent legislative acts which we tolerate from force of long habit. Though "the returns . . . . are not encouraging to any Harvard undergraduate," yet we trust that they may at least be stimulating, and that the seed now being sown at Harvard may yet bring forth much fruit...
...from the refined conversation of home life or the puerilities of school life is strangely sudden; they are dropped or intensified almost immediately - and because this transition is so sudden we are led to ask seriously whether the use of Harvard slang is merely an affectation or an unconscious habit. Members of the freshman class may always be relied upon to betray their collegiate standing by an inordinate use of purely Harvard expletives. This would seem to argue affectation. But again the post-graduate will make use of the same terms with only the addition of a rather indifferent drawl...
President McCosh, of Princeton, has a curious habit, when disturbed in any way, of chewing the knuckle of his thumb. On one occasion when he had been lecturing on the relations of good and evil of the world, he was asked by some inquisitive divinity student to explain the origin of evil. Replied the president, with a strong Doric accent: - "Well, ye have asked me a vera deeficult question. All the feelosophers of antiquity have tried their hand at it. Sookrates tried it and failed; Plato did no better. Descarites, Spinoza and Leibnitz were obliged to confess...