Word: mother-in-law
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...which may be settled by fines or minor purifications, there are certain great crimes which are so rarely committed as to be considered abnormalities and hence generators of baleful influences which may affect a whole village. Among various tribes such horrendous offenses may be looking one's mother-in-law in the face, pronouncing a husband's name, milking of cows by a woman. Almost everywhere one of the greatest crimes is incest. Dr. Lévy-Bruhl believes that philosophers looking for some obscure moral or esthetic urge to explain the primitive horror of incest...
...strictly to their own curious codes. Although they held to the ideal of monogamy, faithful and austere wives and husbands were respected rather than imitated. A man automatically took possession of his wife's younger sisters if he wanted them. But he could not speak to his mother-in-law, nor could she speak to him. While adultery was sometimes punished, it involved no disgrace, and it was considered beneath a brave's dignity to show jealousy. For two weeks each year the Crow engaged in a curious custom of wife-stealing, and after a general reshuffling...
...couple of shells in my pocket, so ... I fired through the kitchen wall, intending to hit my father-in-law." Instead, Carol Douglas hit his year-old baby, his wife, his mother-in-law and his sister-in-law...
...best authority, he solemnly announced, that the nation's widows and widowers were planning a mass scrutiny of pink slips in a hunt for wealthy mates. Texas' Connally said one of his constituents wanted the publicity provision repealed so that his inquisitive mother-in-law could not determine his income, get her allowance raised...
...stand after cross examination, but Counsel Reilly was feeling better than he had felt all week. Basing his case on the theory that the crime "was conceived in the Lindbergh home itself," he had scored a point in demonstrating that the household servants of the Colonel's mother-in-law knew of the Lindbergh family's movements immediately before the crime. Having narrowed the guilty crew down to "four people in a roadhouse," Counsel Reilly had already dramatically told reporters that he would reveal their identity this week...