Word: ritualization
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...floor with her walkie-talkie. Scores of teachers and student monitors are assigned sections of the gym, alert to everything from fights to the booing of freshmen, a long-standing tradition that has been banned this year as part of the campaign against factionalism. Also gone is the ritual of announcing entire team rosters during the pep rally. Administrators don't want to turn an otherwise popular jock into a target of the disaffected. Says Cliff Ice, the new football coach: "We don't want the players to be perceived around the school as something special...
Maree Florence has a spot reserved in her living room for at least an hour each day. The ritual is simple; she sits down, calls a friend and turns on the TV. She's not interested in following the inflated antics on General Hospital or in catching the latest familial betrayal on Jerry Springer. Instead, she turns on the back-to-back A Wedding Story and A Baby Story--half-hour shows about real couples getting married and having kids--on TLC daytime. "I cry at every one," says the 21-year-old Georgia mom. "I can't help...
Ethernet registration has for several years been a fall ritual--unless they log on to a public terminal, take a quiz and give information about their computers, students can't connect to the Internet. And once they've registered, that is the only jack they...
...long marches" celebrating localized Taoist gods. Tai Shan, a holy mountain south of Beijing, is one of the country's most popular tourist sites--especially among would-be grandmothers, who trudge to the top, drape red strings over trees and then return home to wait for the grandson this ritual is supposed to guarantee. The searching need for faith is written on the faces of the Chinese who pace each day, by the thousands, through the "Confucian forest" in Qufu. There, among the 600-year-old birch trees, are buried 77 generations of Confucius' descendants. Their graves, trashed and looted...
With her pixieish smile intact, Ernestine manages to dart out of the thicket and rejoin her husband. Now he can play tour guide--a mordant commentator who wants us to know he finds this ritual, like so many other campaign rituals, faintly ridiculous. "All right, well, this is the church," he says. "These trees are tulip trees. And as you can see, it's one of those great stone churches." He tells us how his father, a bank president who suffered from calcified arthritis of the spine, used to "sit and look out at this churchyard, and it gave...