Word: precept
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Elliott Roosevelt, who owns the business with his mother, sold twlve-foot trees at $1 retail, to "make Christians out of Christmas-tree dealers," he explained. He had sold 50,000 trees wholesale, and figured that within a few years he would be selling 100,000 a year. Following precept with example, Elliott & wife Faye (in a mink coat and jodhpurs) juiced up the sales by doing some hawking in person-and got rid of 500 trees...
...June. Last week, honeymooning in Canada, they heard from Marietta: the trustees wanted Dr. Shimer to resign. He had been a good administrator, the trustees said; the whole trouble was his "divorce and remarriage. A college president should be an inspiration. . . . An example is better than 'a precept...
Limning, as the Elizabethans called it, was done with opaque watercolor on vellum using fine brushes called pencils. In his Art of Limning, Hilliard directed: "The first and chiefest precept which I give is cleanliness, and therefore fittest for gentlemen, that the practicer of limning be precisely pure and cleanly in all his doings . . . take heed of the dandruff of the head shedding from the hair, and of speaking over your work for sparkling, for the least sparkling of spittle will never be helped if it light in the face or any part of the naked...
...Lose a Precept. British Tories agree almost unanimously on the necessity of thorough public controls. They quarrel mostly with the degree and not the principle of public ownership. They believe that free enterprise has gone out of their lives; and a sizable minority believes that that is a good thing. The current best hope of most businessmen who think of themselves as conservatives is that they will be left reasonably unrestricted as the agents of public enterprise...
...comedy was based on the oldest precept of the cardsharp and the carnival grifter-"everyone has a little larceny in his heart." When he kicked Baby Le Roy, interrupted a moment of fraudulent grief to execute a moth, or eyed a sheriff with ponderous injured dignity, his audiences admitted their spottiness of soul and rejoiced...