Word: wonted
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Dates: during 1920-1929
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SWEENEY TODD?A mid-19th Century barber makes meat-pies of his enemies, thus moving us to mirth where he was wont to curl the hair of our grandfathers...
...Prince's special wish that no public celebration should be held to commemorate his 30 years of bachelorhood. Under similar circumstances the public has been wont to find a way of rendering homage to a popular figure, but no word of such a demonstration came from London. Can it be that His Royal Highness is not quite as popular as he formerly was? If not, he knows the antidote...
...pursuit of happiness", especially on Sundays, was carefully regulated by the government long before the present generation of "self-seeking people" arrived on the scene. And if Mr. Mackay pushed his historical inquiries a little further he would discover that the price of bread and ale in England was wont to be fixed by town authorities...
...their daughters not to read the newly popular works of the renegade Defoe, they started the novel off with a reputation from which it has barely recovered. During the eighteenth century especially it fared evilly among the colonists of the New World; in fact the stern-eyed Puritans were wont to frown upon it as the very text book of the devil himself. Even Thomas Jefferson, though a Virginian and a liberal democrat, felt called upon to declare that "a great obstacle to good education is the inordinate passion prevalent for novels and the time lost in that reading which...
...Mencken and George Jean Nathan might prove far more effective if these doughty warriors wielded rapiers rather than fountain pens, and shocked an apathetic world with flying gauntlets instead of with a satire which too often goes unperceived. On the other hand, the bitterness with which these gentlemen are wont to attack beloved American traditions might be considerably tempered by a realization that swift vengeance by a biting blade would probably follow an unguarded word...