Word: rulings
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...post-Labor Day moratorium on white clothing and accessories has long ranked among etiquette hard-liners' most sacred rules. As punishment for breaking it in the 1994 movie Serial Mom, for instance, Patty Hearst's character was murdered by a punctilious psychopath. But ask your average etiquette expert how that rule came to be, and chances are that even she couldn't explain it. So why aren't we supposed to wear white after Labor...
This is all sound logic, to be sure - but that's exactly why it may be wrong. "Very rarely is there actually a functional reason for a fashion rule," notes Valerie Steele, director of the Museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology. True enough: it's hard to think of a workaday downside to pairing your black shoes with a brown belt. (See pictures of Pope Benedict's fashion looks...
Instead, other historians speculate, the origin of the no-white-after-Labor Day rule may be symbolic. In the early 20th century, white was the uniform of choice for Americans well-to-do enough to decamp from their city digs to warmer climes for months at a time: light summer clothing provided a pleasing contrast to drabber urban life. "If you look at any photograph of any city in America in the 1930s, you'll see people in dark clothes," says Scheips, many scurrying to their jobs. By contrast, he adds, the white linen suits and Panama hats at snooty...
...three ancient arts of discourse, harkens back to the Greeks—beginning with the fifth century B.C.E. Sophists, or even earlier. Long ago, thinkers highly valued verbal persuasion and deemed it a central facet of education. The field of rhetoric changed and developed during Roman rule and onward, until Harvard itself established the Boylston Professorship of Rhetoric and Oratory in 1806. It was Francis J. Child, the second professor to hold the position, who shifted the job once and for all toward literature and away from public speaking. Now, Harvard’s commitment to rhetoric is almost nothing...
Afghanistan is replete with grim reminders for those who would wish to rule it. The British were having a marvelous time in Kabul back in 1841: horse races, picnics, amateur theatrics (something British expats indulge in wherever they go) and lot of good grog and food. Meanwhile, the Afghans were seething over these madcap Victorians. (See pictures of election day in Afghanistan...