"Taboo" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... observed the taboo system. If applied to places, they may not be entered or approached; if to persons, they may not be touched, or may not feed themselves; if to things, they may not be touched. The system, however, did not appear to be so rigidly observed in Tonga ...
— Captain Cook - His Life, Voyages, and Discoveries • W.H.G. Kingston
... seemed ready to run risks in the defence of London, he, K., was not, and as he had already explained, big demands would make his position difficult with France; difficult everywhere; and might end by putting him (K.) in the cart. Besika Bay and Alexandretta were, therefore, taboo—not to be touched! Even after we force the Narrows no troops are to be landed along the Asian coastline. Nor are we to garrison any part of the Gallipoli Peninsula excepting only the Bulair Lines which had best be permanently held, K. thinks, by ...
— Gallipoli Diary, Volume I • Ian Hamilton
... him and any departure from them filled him with dread. Sometimes the prohibition might have some reasonable justification, sometimes it might seem wholly absurd and even a great nuisance, but that made no difference in its binding force. For example, pork was taboo among the ancient Hebrews—no one can say why, but none of the modern justifications for abstaining from that particular kind of meat would have counted in early Jewish times. It is not improbable that it was the original veneration for the boar and not an abhorrence of him ...
— The Mind in the Making - The Relation of Intelligence to Social Reform • James Harvey Robinson
... of any special hate toward that young man.. If he had been in his power he would probably have left him unharmed. He could not, indeed, have raised his hand against anything which Madeline cared for. However great his animosity had been, that fact would have made his rival taboo to him. That Madeline had turned away from him was the great matter. Whither she was turned was of subordinate importance. His trouble was that she loved Cordis, not that Cordis loved her. It is only ...
— Dr. Heidenhoff's Process • Edward Bellamy
... treats of early religion, from the point of view of Anthropology and Folk-lore; and is the first attempt that has been made in any language to weave together the results of recent investigations into such topics as Sympathetic Magic, Taboo, Totemism, Fetishism, etc., so as to present a systematic account of the growth of primitive religion and the development ...
— The Wallypug in London • G. E. Farrow
... instance, is actually imminent—as in terms of freedom from spiritual, or mystic, danger. The fear of ill-luck, in other words, is the bogy that haunts him night and day. Hence his life is enmeshed, as Dr. Frazer puts it, in a network of taboos. A taboo is anything that one must not do lest ill-luck befall. And ill-luck is catching, like an infectious disease. If my next-door neighbour breaks a taboo, and brings down a visitation on himself, depend upon it some of its unpleasant consequences will be passed on to me and mine. ...
— Anthropology • Robert Marett
... Chink himself realizes the commercial value of the taboo, the bizarre and the unclean. Nightly the rubber-neck car swinging gayly with lanterns stops before the imitation joss house, the spurious opium joint and tortuous passage to the fake fan-tan and faro game, with a farewell call at Hong Joy Fah's Oriental restaurant and the well-stocked novelty ...
— Tutt and Mr. Tutt • Arthur Train
... he responded, and he left the palm room with head down- bent, as if he were already pondering the problem, the solving of which was to free him from the self-imposed taboo of her house. ...
— Out of the Primitive • Robert Ames Bennet
... and obstruct their activities. This obstruction is seen quite as clearly on the food side as on the side of sex, in the fact that the old men make certain foods which are not abundant (notably the kangaroo and the opossum) taboo to the young men and the women, and thus reserve these delicacies for themselves. We have already seen, however, that the tribe usually makes some kind of a tardy sexual provision for its male members, and ...
— Sex and Society • William I. Thomas
... times was unable to tolerate her freedom. She was condemned in no small still voice as immoral, loose, scandalous; and writer after writer, leaving her unread, reiterated the charge till it passed into a byword of criticism, and her works were practically taboo in literature, a type and summary of all that was worst and foulest in Restoration days. The absurdities and falsity or this extreme are of course patent now, and it was inevitable ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn, Vol. I (of 6) • Aphra Behn
... Research, have demonstrated the possibility and the fact of such control. It should also be remembered that the average "expert alienist" is guided solely by results of such obsession, where it occurs; that he is blind to causes, liable to exclude or taboo obsession, and therefore ...
— The New Avatar and The Destiny of the Soul - The Findings of Natural Science Reduced to Practical Studies - in Psychology • Jirah D. Buck
... campaign had never before been known in England. Candidates who, even inadvertently, used such words as "Conservative," "Radical," or "Liberal," were hissed into silence. Even the word "Labour" was taboo, so far as it referred to any political party. "Duty," "Patriotism," "Defence," "Citizenship," "United Empire," "British Federation," and, again, ringing loudly above all other cries, "Duty"—those were the watchwords and the platforms of the invasion year elections. The candidate who ...
— The Message • Alec John Dawson
... job?" repeated the captain to one of the members, "I would but the devil take it, how can a man go around asking for a job in a dress suit? And I'm so rotten big that none of my friends can loan me a suit. And my credit is gone with at least twelve different tailors. I'm sort o' taboo as a borrower. Barry, old top, if you will chase the blighter after another highball, ...
— A Thousand and One Afternoons in Chicago • Ben Hecht
... warmest clothing and permitting ourselves one blanket and a small piece of canvas, we huddled together in a cramped posture and kept vigil through the long hours. Neither of us smoked anyway, and of course, this was absolutely taboo; we hardly whispered, and even shifted our positions with utmost caution. Before us lay our bows ready strung, and arrows, both in the quiver belted upright to the screen and standing ...
— Hunting with the Bow and Arrow • Saxton Pope
... did not plunge into the water after him. The salt sea, as well as the lagoons that led out of the salt sea, were taboo. "Taboo," as word or sound, had no place in Jerry's vocabulary. But its definition, or significance, was there in the quickest part of his consciousness. He possessed a dim, vague, imperative knowingness that it was not merely not ...
— Jerry of the Islands • Jack London
... Luck, whom he seemed to have wiped from the slate of his recollection, nor did he again allude to the mutiny. Once, when I touched upon it, he had cut me short, and I could see from his manner that all reference to it must henceforth be taboo. But I could not help sometimes recalling the picture of the boat with the solitary man on board of her, drifting upon the grey waste of sea, and I often wondered if Dirk Hartog had been able to obliterate ...
— Adventures in Southern Seas - A Tale of the Sixteenth Century • George Forbes
... enjoyed a sip of Thackeray, reading at a venture, in "Vanity Fair," about the Battle of Waterloo. It was not like Lever's accounts of battles, but it was enchanting. However, "Vanity Fair" was under a taboo. It is not easy to say why; but Mr. Thackeray himself informed a small boy, whom he found reading "Vanity Fair" under the table, that he had better read something else. What harm can the story do to a child? He reads about ...
— Adventures among Books • Andrew Lang
... you can find, any way on earth you want it, only in my room. That is taboo, as I told you. What am I going ...
— The Harvester • Gene Stratton Porter
... Emile found life without being able to move out of the house almost more than a man born to the sea and the trail could bear. Small dogs in civilization are wont to fill this gap. But alas, "down North" small dogs are taboo—their imperious Eskimo congeners having ...
— Labrador Days - Tales of the Sea Toilers • Wilfred Thomason Grenfell
... ordinary costume of their race—a slip of native cloth about the loins. Indecorous as their behaviour was, these worthies turned out to be a deputation from the reverend the clergy of the island; and the object of their visit was to put our ship under a rigorous "Taboo," to prevent the disorderly scenes and facilities for desertion which would ensue, were the natives—men and women—allowed to ...
— Omoo: Adventures in the South Seas • Herman Melville
... occasion required, in his boot-legging operations or other questionable enterprises—were lounging, some standing, some sitting, watching a slow poker game going on at the last table. Cards, under the laws of Texas, are taboo, but for some reason Sabota managed to get by and games were ...
— The Ramblin' Kid • Earl Wayland Bowman
... and variety, what could destroy and taboo both more effectually than the rigid and rigorous demands of a formal set of examinations prepared, as a rule, by pedantic specialists who know practically nothing of the fundamental problems and ...
— The Making of Arguments • J. H. Gardiner
... is precisely that which led me to formulate my theory in the first place. How else are we to explain that the Nipe, for all his tremendous technical knowledge, is nonetheless a member of a society that is still in the ancient ritual-taboo ...
— Anything You Can Do ... • Gordon Randall Garrett
... the men spend the day and occasionally the night. In rainy weather they sit round the fire, smoking, gossiping and working on some tool,—a club or a fine basket. Each clan has its own gamal, which is strictly taboo for the women, and to each gamal belongs a dancing-ground like the one described. On Vao there are five, corresponding ...
— Two Years with the Natives in the Western Pacific • Felix Speiser
... appearance of composure but in truth she was badly shaken. Money matters was just about the one real taboo that she respected and to break over this habitual reticence even with an old friend like Wallace troubled her delicacy. The notion she got from the look in his face that there was something dubious about her father's solvency, was terrifying. She hid her hands ...
— Mary Wollaston • Henry Kitchell Webster
... thought). Yes, some patients play and sing. (With a smile.) If you'd call the noise they make by those terms. They'd dance, too, if we permitted it. There's only one big taboo—Home, Sweet Home. We forbid that—for ...
— The Straw • Eugene O'Neill
... some mysterious Asiatic equivalent to the still-room—drenches that smelt pestilently and tasted worse. She stood over Kim till they went down, and inquired exhaustively after they had come up. She laid a taboo upon the forecourt, and enforced it by means of an armed man. It is true he was seventy odd, that his scabbarded sword ceased at the hilt; but he represented the authority of the Sahiba, and loaded wains, chattering servants, calves, dogs, hens, and the like, fetched a wide compass by ...
— Kim • Rudyard Kipling
... release the more favoured altogether. The only remarkable thing that I perceive is the scrupulous respect shown to the as yet unopened neighbouring cocoon. However eager to come out, the Osmia is most careful not to touch it with his mandibles: it is taboo. He will demolish the partition, he will gnaw the side-wall fiercely, even though there be nothing left but wood, he will reduce everything around him to dust; but touch a cocoon that obstructs his way? Never! He will not make himself an outlet by ...
— Bramble-bees and Others • J. Henri Fabre
... the Ssassaror had discovered that if they lived meatless, they had a much easier time curbing their belligerency, obeying the Skins and remaining cooperative. So they induced the Earthmen to put a taboo on eating flesh. The only drawback to the meatless diet was that both Ssassaror and Man became as stunted in stature as they did in aggressiveness, the former so much so that they barely came to the chins of the Humans. ...
— Rastignac the Devil • Philip Jose Farmer
... it discourteous to mention money at table, but in this degenerate age no subject is taboo except those that would be taboo in any decent society. Obviously when men meet to talk over business they cannot leave money out of the discussion. In a number of firms the executives have lunch together, ...
— The Book of Business Etiquette • Nella Henney
... O the German taboo is quite over; no soul attempts to support the C. J. or the President, they are past hope; the whites have just refused their taxes—I mean the council has refused to call for them, and if the council ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 25 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... said, looking him fairly in the eye, "belongs to the past, and is taboo. I won't hear a word about it. This is to-day. Get up, and we'll set about putting wrong right. You're a man again. Don't forget that. And I'm your friend. ...
— The Lieutenant-Governor • Guy Wetmore Carryl
... Shepherd,' and I want a landscape and sky, and how ugly lead lines look in a pale-blue sky! I get them like shapes of cloud, and still it cuts the sky up till it looks like 'random-rubble' masonry." Therefore large spaces of pale sky are "taboo," they will not do for glass, and you must modify your whole outlook, your whole composition, to suit what will do. If you must have sky, it must be like a Titian sky—deep blue, with well-defined masses of cloud—and you must throw to the winds resolutely all idea of attempting to imitate the ...
— Stained Glass Work - A text-book for students and workers in glass • C. W. Whall
... "Under what strange taboo am I placed?" said he, gayly, as he laid his hand on her shrinking arm. "I inquire for Helen,—she is ill, and cannot see me. I come to sun myself in your presence, and you fly me as if gods and men had set their mark ...
— My Novel, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... heard to exclaim, as she turned her rapt gaze beyond the venerable, vine-clad buildings: "Oh, I feel as if I just couldn't stand it, all this wealth of beauty, of love, of boundless good!" And yet she was alone, always alone. For her dark story had reared a hedge about her; the taboo rested upon her; and even in the crowded classrooms the schoolmates of her own sex looked askance and drew ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... little girl, was not greatly interested in ships, but, because Uncle Cy was making it, she pretended to be vastly concerned about this one. On Saturdays and after school hours she sat on a box in the wood shed, where the captain had put up a small stove, and watched him work. The taboo which so many of our righteous and Atkins-worshiping townspeople had put upon the Whittaker place and its occupants included her, and a number of children had been forbidden to play with her. This, however, did not prevent their tormenting her about her ...
— Cy Whittaker's Place • Joseph C. Lincoln
... States; with the sea-lions of California, the wonderful revival of ibex in Spain and deer in Maine and New Brunswick, the great preserves in Uganda, India and Ceylon, the selective work of Baron von Berlepsch in Germany, the curious result of taboo protection up the Nelson river, and the effects on seafowl in cases as far apart in time and space as the guano islands under the Incas of Peru, Gardiner island in the United States or the Bass rock off the coast ...
— Animal Sanctuaries in Labrador • William Wood
... Pariah, I am unfit to live! In a savage country, to which my thoughts often wander, I would stumble over every taboo, and soon find myself in the oven. As it is, I stumble over everything, stools and lady's trains, and upset porcelain, and break all the odds and ends with which I fidget, and spill the salt, and then pour claret over it, and call on the right people at the wrong houses, ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Volume 102, January 23, 1892 • Various
... general principles. It is with these general principles that the moralist is concerned. The anthropologist may regard it as his duty to spend much labor in the attempt to discover why this or that act, this or that article of food, happens in a given community to be taboo to certain persons. The student of ethics is not bound to take up the detailed investigation of such matters. Human nature, in its general constitution, is much the same in different races and peoples. ...
— A Handbook of Ethical Theory • George Stuart Fullerton
... the case. They observe the symptoms, and outlook or intentionally ignore the hidden cause, the deviations from the Word of God, which disturb the unity of the Spirit. And doctrinal discussions, which alone can bring about a real cure, are intentionally omitted and expressly declared taboo, as, e. g., by the Federal Council. The Church, suffering from blood-poisoning, is pronounced cured when the sores have been covered. They put a plaster over the gap in Zion's wall, which may hide, ...
— American Lutheranism - Volume 1: Early History of American Lutheranism and The Tennessee Synod • Friedrich Bente
... "Forgetting exact principles for a moment, ud Klavan, you realize that the actuality will sometimes stray from the ideal. Our citizens, for example, do not habitually carry weapons except under extraordinary conditions. But that is a civil taboo, rather than a fixed amendation of our constitution. I have no doubt that some future generation, mores having shifted, will, for ...
— Citadel • Algirdas Jonas Budrys
... cheerful world?—It surely is. And if you understand your biz You'll taboo the worry worm, And ...
— The S. W. F. Club • Caroline E. Jacobs
... N. prohibition, inhibition; veto, disallowance; interdict, interdiction; injunction, estoppel [Law]; embargo, ban, taboo, proscription; index expurgatorius [Lat.]; restriction &c (restraint) 751; hindrance &c 706; forbidden fruit; Maine law [U.S.]. V. prohibit, inhibit; forbid, put one's veto upon, disallow, enjoin, ban, outlaw, taboo, proscribe, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... more of it than less," said her father, gravely. "These Americans have some curious ideas. While they are proud enough to trace their ancestry back to French or English or even Italian rank, they taboo titles except such as are won by merit. And it must be confessed they have had many brave men among them, heroes animated by broader views than the first conquerors of ...
— A Little Girl in Old Detroit • Amanda Minnie Douglas
... zone a group of officers were huddled around a small piano trying to make the best of a lightless evening, and, having sung every song from Keep the Home Fires Burning to You're in the Army Now, paused, longingly toyed cigarettes which were taboo by ship's order, and then ...
— The Story of The American Legion • George Seay Wheat
... light operas and operettas have flourished to a considerable degree. Mary Grant Carmichael met with some success through her operetta, "The Snow Queen," but like Miss Smyth gave the world a more important work in the shape of a mass. Ethel Harraden, sister of the novelist, had her opera, "The Taboo," brought out at the Trafalgar Square Theatre, London, with excellent results. She has composed an operetta, "His Last Chance," besides vocal, choral, and violin pieces. Harriet Maitland Young has completed several operettas, of which "An Artist's ...
— Woman's Work in Music • Arthur Elson
... unsexing of ourselves, and worse Effeminizing of the male. We were Content, sir, till you starved us, heart and brain. All we have done, or wise or otherwise, Traced to the root, was done for love of you. Let us taboo all vain comparisons, And go forth as God meant us, hand in hand, Companions, mates and comrades evermore; Two parts of one ...
— Memories of Childhood's Slavery Days • Annie L. Burton
... with his wife only till daybreak'—like Cupid—and flees, like Cupid, before the light. Among the Australians the chief deity, if deity such a being can be called, Pundjel, 'has a wife whose face he has never seen,' probably in compliance with some primaeval etiquette or taboo. {73a} ...
— Custom and Myth • Andrew Lang
... often occupied his thoughts, and that his speculations have led him to conclusions which are, on the whole, true, although perhaps incorrect in matters of detail. Most children, unable to ask their mother or father direct questions upon matters which they feel instinctively are taboo, have pieced together, from their reading and observation, a faulty theory of sexual life. The pursuit of such knowledge, in secret, is not a healthy occupation for the child. His parents' silence has given him the feeling that the unexplored land is forbidden ground. In satisfying his ...
— The Nervous Child • Hector Charles Cameron
... priest, patting her shoulder gently, "we will have no Greek debate today. Mr. Ware has been permitted to taboo camp-meetings, and I claim the privilege to cry off on Greeks. Look at those fellows down there, trampling over one another to get more beer. What have they to do with Athens, or Athens with them? I take it, Mr. Ware," he went on, with a grave face ...
— The Damnation of Theron Ware • Harold Frederic
... but neither could employ it for the ends of love. No. 8 was barred to George as much by his own dignity as by the invisible sword of the old man; and of course he could not break the immemorial savage taboo of a club by introducing a girl into it. The Duke of Wellington himself, though Candle Court was his purdah, could never have broken the taboo of even so modest a club as Pickering's. Owing to the absence of Agg, who had gone to Wales with ...
— The Roll-Call • Arnold Bennett
... her in the office when he appeared the next morning, with her harness over her head. It was the sign in a way that she was strictly business and all personal confidences were taboo, but Rimrock did not take the hint. It annoyed him, some way, that drum over her ear and the transmitter hung on her breast, for when he had seen her the evening before all these ...
— Rimrock Jones • Dane Coolidge
... keep bringing "lovely sharp flints," but there is much careful observation, observation which has a motive. "I would put a stone in a stick and chuck it at them" is followed by much experiment at fixing. String is of course taboo, but bass is allowed because it grows, also strips of skin. We very often get the suggestion "they might find a stone with a hole in it," which leads to renewed searching and to the endeavour to make holes. To make a hole in flint is beyond us, but in a softer ...
— The Child Under Eight • E.R. Murray and Henrietta Brown Smith
... looks favourably on a modicum of Sunday Cricket or Football, and does not taboo even the enormity of Lawn-tennis. As against that eminently strict Sabbatarian, Mrs. GRUNDY, the tennis-player may defend himself by a reference to the "services" ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 104, May 13, 1893 • Various
... the beach-comber; "perhaps some niggers you've been reading about call it the Mark. I don't know. But to be done with this pig. The fire was ready, and they were just going to cut the poor beast's throat with a green-stone knife, when the interpreter up and told them 'hands off.' 'That's a taboo pig,' says he. 'A black fellow that died six months ago that pig belonged to. When he was dying, and leaving his property to his friends, he was very sorry to part with the pig, so he made him taboo; nobody can touch him. To eat him ...
— In the Wrong Paradise • Andrew Lang
... fiddle heard only in the graveyards of the negroes (like the fairy music under the fairy hill at Ballachulish), is very remarkable. Now the Red Indian story has no harper, and no visit by the hero to the land of the dead. His grief brings his wife back to him, and he loses her again by breaking a taboo, as Orpheus did by looking back, a thing always forbidden. Thus we do not know whether or not the Red Indian version is borrowed from the European myth, probably enough it is not. But in no case—not even when the same plot and incidents occur among Egyptians and ...
— The Book of Romance • Various
... up stairs to their sleeping-rooms, screaming and laughing and singing native songs that had been forbidden in the school, and, taking their shawls and Sunday dresses from their trunks, they arrayed themselves in all their finery and began dancing an old heathen dance which is taboo among the better class of natives and only practised in secret by the more degraded class of ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 26, October, 1880 • Various
... essentially arbitrary at the outset, though they tend to become natural through the survival of the fittest. A favorite device for perpetuating institutions among the primitive peoples of many districts on different continents is the taboo, or prohibition, which is commonly fiducial but is often of general application. This device finds its best development in the earlier stages in the development of belief, and is normally connected with totemism. Another device, which is remarkably widespread, as shown by Morgan, is kinship ...
— The Siouan Indians • W. J. McGee
... Occasionally, he thought of Ethel; but, for the most part, his mind was on the man before him, the man whose active career all at once had been cut in two. Now and then he thought of the one who had chosen to fire those bullets, taboo of all but the most brutal warfare. At such times, he rose and fell to pacing restlessly up and down the car. Then he controlled himself and ...
— On the Firing Line • Anna Chapin Ray and Hamilton Brock Fuller
... children, peeping through iron gateways into old courtyards, venturing their heads into the murk of black stairways, talking (on the part of Aristide) with mothers who nursed chuckling babes on their doorsteps, crossing the thresholds, hitherto taboo, of churches, and meeting the mystery of coloured glass and shadows and ...
— The Joyous Adventures of Aristide Pujol • William J. Locke
... obliged to move, to say something, to break the tensity of the strain. One step—the single step by which she had dared to draw nearer him, stretching out yearning hands toward him—one step sufficed to take her back to the world of conventionalities and commonplaces, where the heart's aching is taboo. ...
— The Street Called Straight • Basil King
... do it without making of him an enemy at heart, for he did not know how strong a hold the religion of the Ho-don had upon them, for since the time that he had prevented Ta-den and Om-at from quarreling over a religious difference the subject had been utterly taboo among them. He was therefore quick to note the evident though wordless resentment of Ko-tan at the suggestion that he entirely relinquish his throne to his guest. On the whole, however, the effect had been satisfactory as he could see from the renewed ...
— Tarzan the Terrible • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... cathartic, that is, intended to purge away evil influences (kathairein, to make katharos, pure). But, as Robertson Smith observes, "holiness is contagious, just as uncleanness is''; and common things and persons may become taboo, that is, so holy as to be dangerous and useless for daily life through the mere infection of holiness. Thus in Syria one who touched a dove became taboo for one whole day, and if a drop of blood of the Hebrew sin-offering fell on a garment it had to ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... henceforth known in history as the "Golden Dynasty," in 1035 changed the word chen for chih, and were called Nue-chih Tartars. They did this because at that date the word chen was part of the personal name of the reigning Kitan Emperor, and therefore taboo. The necessity for such change would of course cease with their emancipation from Kitan rule, and the old name would be revived; it will accordingly be continued in the ...
— China and the Manchus • Herbert A. Giles
... These States. Prohibition was saddled upon the country, against the expressed wish of at least two-thirds of the people, by the political chicanery of the same organization, and yet no one, during the long fight, thought to attack it directly; to have done so would have been to violate the taboo described. So when the returning soldiers began to reveal the astounding chicaneries of the Young Men's Christian Association, it was marvelled at for a few weeks, as Americans always marvel at successful pocket-squeezings, but no ...
— The American Credo - A Contribution Toward the Interpretation of the National Mind • George Jean Nathan
... that if the people had sufficient intelligence and moral strength to taboo tobacco, this comparatively senseless outgo would be largely devoted to supplying these and other necessities of ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 711, August 17, 1889 • Various
... afraid that each individual reader will not find every single passage to his liking, yet I think I may be pretty confident that the variety of styles will recommend the whole to all classes. For at a banquet, though we each one of us taboo certain dishes, yet we all praise the banquet as a whole, nor do the dishes which our palate declines make those we like any less enjoyable. I want my speech to be taken in the same spirit, not because ...
— The Letters of the Younger Pliny - Title: The Letters of Pliny the Younger - - Series 1, Volume 1 • Pliny the Younger
... Federalist, Marshall's sole book of precedents, ceases to be cited. Among the theories which in one way or other received the Court's approval during this period were the notion of Dual Federalism, the doctrine of the Police Power, the taboo on delegation of legislative power, the derived doctrine of Due Process of Law, the conception of liberty as Freedom of Contract, and still others. The sources of some of these doctrines and the nature ...
— The Constitution of the United States of America: Analysis and Interpretation • Edward Corwin
... rich among them had more than one wife, while the poor or otherwise ineligible often had none at all, since inter-marriage with other races and above all with the Black Kendah dwelling beyond the river was so strictly taboo that it was punishable ...
— The Ivory Child • H. Rider Haggard
... observance, of taboo, of folkways, ends. And into the brain of all living beings will be born the perfect comprehension of their own ...
— The Crimson Tide • Robert W. Chambers
... teachers of sophomores, should deal with but a single episode. That dictum is probably true; but it admits of wider interpretation than is generally given it. The teller of tales, anxious to escape from restriction but not avid of being cast into the outer darkness of the taboo, can in self-justification become as technical as any lawyer. The phrase "a single episode" is loosely worded. The rule does not specify an episode in one man's life; it might be in the life of a family, or a state, or even of a whole people. In that case the action might ...
— The Killer • Stewart Edward White
... Schluesselberg prison, situated on a small island in Lake Ladoga near the effluence of the Neva. There they languish in solitary confinement or are transferred to far-off Sakhalin, whose very name is taboo in St. Petersburg.[914] During our Civil War, one of the Dry Tortugas, lying a hundred miles west of the southern point of Florida and at that time the most isolated island belonging to the American government, was used as a ...
— Influences of Geographic Environment - On the Basis of Ratzel's System of Anthropo-Geography • Ellen Churchill Semple
... formula "youngest best," in which the youngest of three brothers succeeds after the others have failed, is one of the most familiar in folk- tales amusingly parodied by Mr. Lang in his Prince Prigio. The taboo against taking food in the underworld occurs in the myth of Proserpine, and is also frequent in folk-tales (Child, i. 322). But the folk-tale parallels to our tale fade into insignificance before its brilliant literary relationships. There can be little doubt that Edgar, in his mad scene ...
— English Fairy Tales • Joseph Jacobs (coll. & ed.)
... and afterwards to talk with him. I found the one subject to avoid was Fairyland. On everything else he was open and amiable in a commonplace sort of way, but on that he had been worried—it was a manifest taboo. Only once in the room did I hear the slightest allusion to his experience in his presence, and that was by a cross-grained farm hand who was losing to him. Skelmersdale had run a break into double figures, which, by the Bignor standards, was uncommonly good play. "Steady on!" said his adversary. ...
— Twelve Stories and a Dream • H. G. Wells
... attitude toward death is the same as that of many primitive races. Any reference to death is strongly tabooed amongst them and to transgress this taboo, exposes the individual to grave danger and severe punishment, even the punishment of the thing tabooed. Thus the person who transgresses this taboo becomes himself taboo by arousing the anger or resentment of other members of the tribe. However, a certain ambivalent tendency ...
— The Journal of Abnormal Psychology - Volume 10
... "If I taboo the drinking man, I may be an old maid." Then be an old maid, get some "bloom of youth," paint up and love yourself. John B. Gough said: "You better be laughed at for not being married, than never to laugh any more ...
— Wit, Humor, Reason, Rhetoric, Prose, Poetry and Story Woven into Eight Popular Lectures • George W. Bain
... for relief, as in nagging, whining, crying, or grumbling, is taboo. If you are tired or irritable, you can rest or exercise for restoration, as in the days before marriage. To pour out troubles or act out annoyance without restraint before the mate is to wear out his or her spontaneity and dry up the ...
— The Good Housekeeping Marriage Book • Various
... I debated with myself whether to go on talking of Langdon. I decided against it because all I knew of him had to do with matters down town—and Monson had impressed it upon me that down town was taboo in the drawing-room. I rummaged my brain in vain ...
— The Deluge • David Graham Phillips
... and practices. Cuchullin goes forth knowing that he will meet his doom. His name signifies "hound of Culann." In his youth he slew Culann's ferocious watch-hound which attacked him, and took its place until another was trained. It was "geis" (taboo) for him to partake of the flesh of a hound (his totem), or eat at a cooking hearth; but he must needs accept the hospitality of the witches. The satirists are satirical bards who, it was believed, ...
— Elves and Heroes • Donald A. MacKenzie
... it, at a time when the whole of the common life and vigour was required for its reproduction and multiplication. This idea may have operated to enable the savage to restrain himself from digging up and eating the grain sown in the ground, or slaughtering his domestic animals for food, and a taboo on the consumption of grain and fruits during their period of ripening may have first begun in their wild state. The Intichiuma ceremonies of the Australian natives are carried out with the object of increasing the supply of the totem for food purposes. ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India—Volume I (of IV) • R.V. Russell
... which sex is concerned are often needlessly magnified by penalties, ranging from various forms of social ostracism to long sentences of penal servitude, which would be seen to be monstrously disproportionate to the real feeling against them if the removal of both the penalties and the taboo on their discussion made it possible for us to ascertain their real prevalence and estimation. Fortunately there is one outlet for the truth. We are permitted to discuss in jest what we may not discuss ...
— Overruled • George Bernard Shaw
... better words. She knew nothing of social usages, and she was without a suspicion of the coquetry that he looked for in girls before they had begun to do up their hair. She spoke with startling frankness upon subjects which he had been taught were taboo. He admired and was accustomed to soft, helpless, clinging femininity, and it grated upon him to see Kate at the woodpile swinging an axe in a ...
— The Fighting Shepherdess • Caroline Lockhart
... saucers of specimen seeds were ranged little piles of nuts and pine-branches, which supplied body-building material, and which she weighed out with scrupulous accuracy, in accordance with the directions of the "Uric Acid Monthly." Tea and coffee were taboo, since they flooded the blood with purins, and the kitchen boiler rumbled day and night to supply the rivers of boiling water with which (taken in sips) she inundated her system. Strange gaunt females used to come ...
— Queen Lucia • E. F. Benson
... out from time to time with both arms, as if he were swimming under superhuman difficulties. 'I will lead this life no longer. I am a wretched being, cut off from everything that makes life tolerable. I have been under a Taboo in that infernal scoundrel's service. Give me back my wife, give me back my family, substitute Micawber for the petty wretch who walks about in the boots at present on my feet, and call upon me to swallow a sword tomorrow, and I'll do ...
— David Copperfield • Charles Dickens
... overrun by the armies of the French republic, a French general, surrounded by his whole etat major, who had come from Amsterdam to view the wonders of Broek, applied for admission at one of these taboo'd portals. The reply was that the owner never received any one who did not come introduced by some friend. "Very well," said the general, "take my compliments to your master, and tell him I will return here to-morrow with a company of soldiers, 'pour parler raison avec mon ami Hollandais.'" ...
— The Crayon Papers • Washington Irving
... taboo in all Germany these dark days, they tell us," mentioned Jack sagely. "That makes it look as if some sort of military business might be transacted in this isolated place. Gee! I tell you it's getting my curiosity whetted ...
— Air Service Boys Over The Enemy's Lines - The German Spy's Secret • Charles Amory Beach
... redemption. As human nature still actually is, no League of Nations conceivable to us will be able to save us from war. Rend your hearts and not your armaments. Let us learn to look War in the face, and while the blood is cold, so that we may know what we are meaning to do. Let us put a moral taboo upon it, such as we have put upon parricide, or incest, or cannibalism. For certain, in those matters, the reason has put a sanction on the conscience. So will it in the matter of aggressive war. Side by side with that, as we now see, ...
— The Village Wife's Lament • Maurice Hewlett
... The "taboo," or "tapu," prevails also in many of the South Sea Islands, where it may be considered as the substitute for law; although its authority, in reality, rests on what we should rather call religious considerations, inasmuch as it appears to be ...
— John Rutherford, the White Chief • George Lillie Craik
... to shake his head and mutter under his breath, "By George, I wish I had Fenchurch or von Gottschalk here. They're a shade better than I am on intercultural contracts, especially taboo-breakings and ...
— What's He Doing in There? • Fritz Reuter Leiber
... said quietly; "your congratulations are premature, and the subject so far as Alice and I are concerned is taboo for three years—at Mr. Van ...
— Flamsted quarries • Mary E. Waller
... superstitions of Ossory, therefore, we have several of the cardinal features of savage totemism, the descent from the totem-animal, the ascription to the totem of a sacred character, the belief in its protection, and a taboo against killing it. I will venture to suggest, however, that to these important features there is to be added a parallel in survival to the Semang and Arunta features where the local circumstances of birth are the determining forces which supply the totem ...
— Folklore as an Historical Science • George Laurence Gomme
... felt eyes, knew that they were being watched. But no Salarik stepped out of concealment. At least they had nothing to fear in the way of attack. Traders were immune, taboo, and the trading stations were set up under the white diamond shield of peace, a peace guaranteed on blood oath by every clan chieftain in the district. Even in the midst of interclan feuding deadly enemies met in amity under that shield and would not turn claw knife against each ...
— Plague Ship • Andre Norton
... accentuated craving of the girl who knows may ill be balanced by any thought of possible disagreeable consequences. Still more important, however, is a second aspect. The girl to whom the world sex is the great taboo is really held back from lascivious life by an instinctive respect and anxiety. As soon as girl and boy are knowers, all becomes a matter of naked calculation. What they have learned from their instruction in home and school and literature and drama is that the unmarried woman ...
— Psychology and Social Sanity • Hugo Muensterberg
... his best novel, La Religieuse, the paradox (he was himself very fond of paradoxes,[379] though not of the wretched things which now disgrace the name) remains. The very subject of the book, or of the greatest part of it, was for a long time, if it is not still, taboo; and even if this had not been the case, it has other drawbacks. It originated in, and to some extent still retains traces of, one of the silly and ill-bred "mystifications" in which the eighteenth and ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 1 - From the Beginning to 1800 • George Saintsbury
... the war. Although the Osage chieftain was an American (who could claim such proud estate if Totantora could not?), the show by which he was employed had gone direct to Germany from England, and anything English had, from the first, been taboo in Germany. Now, of course, the Indian girl had no idea as to ...
— Ruth Fielding in the Great Northwest - Or, The Indian Girl Star of the Movies • Alice B. Emerson
... is finished, and the seed sown, it is tabooed, that, is rendered sacred, by men appointed for that service, and it is death to trample over or disturb any part of this consecrated ground. The wisdom and utility of this regulation must be obvious to every one. But, however useful this taboo system is to the natives, it is a great inconvenience to a stranger who is rambling over the country, for if he does not use the greatest caution, and procure a guide, he may get himself into a serious dilemma before his rambles be over, which ...
— A Narrative of a Nine Months' Residence in New Zealand in 1827 • Augustus Earle
... did not work altogether smoothly at the beginning, the conversation lasted an hour and a half, which was as long as Clelia dared remain in the aviary. Two or three times, when Fabrice trespassed on forbidden ground and alluded to matters that were taboo, she made no answer and walked away ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 4 • Charles Dudley Warner
... Even the Cigarette was Taboo among these Good People, although Father could Fletcherize about 10 cents' worth of Licorice Plug each ...
— Ade's Fables • George Ade
... Taboo all heretical religious papers; support those that defend the truth. Let infidels maintain infidel papers and build infidel colleges. Not one dollar to propagate infidelity! Make your one short consecrated life count for truth and righteousness. Many ...
— The Evolution Of Man Scientifically Disproved • William A. Williams
... potters rarely employed the human body as a motif. Tiahuanaco is pre-Inca, yet even here the images are clothed. They were not represented as clothed in order to make easier the work of the sculptor. His carving shows he had great skill, was observant, and had true artistic feeling. Apparently the taboo against "nakedness" was ...
— Inca Land - Explorations in the Highlands of Peru • Hiram Bingham
... races is still greater. Many a traveller has found, indeed, a child the best available source of linguistic information, when the idling warriors in their pride, and the hard-working women in their shyness, or taboo-caused fear, failed to respond at all to his requests ...
— The Child and Childhood in Folk-Thought • Alexander F. Chamberlain
... century the taboo prevailed. Certain subjects were rarely mentioned in public, and then only in euphemistic terms. The home, the church, the school; and the press joined in the conspiracy. Supposedly, they were keeping the young in a blessed state of innocence. As a matter of fact, other agencies were busy ...
— The Social Emergency - Studies in Sex Hygiene and Morals • Various
... and his eyes gleamed with a sudden anger. "For God's sake don't mention his name!" he said. "That topic is taboo, Rob. I may tell you, however, that he ...
— Brood of the Witch-Queen • Sax Rohmer
... our races; Joy-riding was taboo in car or train; And when they ventured to kick o'er the traces She strafed her victims till they ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, Jan. 1, 1919 • Various
... to be an Infidel was to be socially taboo. But a little while earlier, to be an Infidel was to be persecuted. But a little earlier still, to be an Infidel was to be an outlaw, subject to the ...
— God and my Neighbour • Robert Blatchford
... owing to the rigorous climate, and they make it harder by their superstitions, for diseases are supposed to be cured by charms and incantations of the shaman or priest; and everything in the way of hunting, fishing, cooking, or of clothing themselves must be done in a prescribed way or it is "taboo" or "hoodoo" as the negroes say. When you read "The Baby Eskimo" you will see just a tiny bit of the hardships, but I should not like to tell you how much more terrible a time he might have had, if he had happened to be ...
— A Treasury of Eskimo Tales • Clara Kern Bayliss
... was not ours? I lift the curtain on this luck, and look out. From an upper window of the house opposite the national emblem of the American Republic is hanging like an apron. Next door to it a man is decorating his windowsills with fairy lamps, and from his demeanour he might be devising a taboo against evil. I see no other sign that the new and better place of our planet was being acknowledged. The street is as the milkman and the postman have always known it ...
— Waiting for Daylight • Henry Major Tomlinson
... with the Creator. He cannot degenerate in religion. He cannot offer sacrifice, for the Creator obviously needs nothing, and again, as there is no death, he cannot slay animals for the Creator. But, in one way or another, usually by breach of a taboo, Death enters the world. Then comes, by process of evolution, belief in hungry spirits, belief in spirits who may inhabit stones or sticks; again there arise priests who know how to propitiate ...
— The Making of Religion • Andrew Lang
... forbidden to land on the holy island, but it was considered a sacrilege for anyone not having business there to enter the precincts of the temple, excepting on the day of the ceremony which had just taken place. While bound to respect this taboo, I was, nevertheless, drawn by an irresistible attraction to the island, where I frequently spent hours in sailing about the wooded shores, or loitering in the sacred avenue, hoping against hope that ...
— A Trip to Venus • John Munro
... thaw that spoiled all outdoor sport for the Lakeview Hall girls. Skating, bobsledding, skiing, and even walking, was taboo for a while, for there was more mud in sight than snow. The girls had to look for entertainment ...
— Nan Sherwood at Rose Ranch • Annie Roe Carr
... Amy in, and was making my bow when Miss Leare stopped me. "Come too," she said cordially: "Amy's brother surely need not be taboo. Shall we drive ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XXVI., December, 1880. • Various
... the origin of totemism. We find no race on its way to becoming totemistic, though we find several in the way of ceasing to be so. They are abandoning female kinship for paternity; their rules of marriage and taboo are breaking down; perhaps various totem kindreds of different crests and names are blending into one local tribe, under the name, perhaps, of the most prosperous totem-kin. But we see no race on its way to becoming totemistic, so we have ...
— Modern Mythology • Andrew Lang
... belongs to the historical acquisitions of humanity and like other moral taboos it must be fixed in many individuals through organic heredity. (Cf. my work, Totem and Taboo, 1913.) Psychoanalytic studies show, however, how intensively the individual struggles with the incest temptations during his development and how frequently he puts them into phantasies and ...
— Three Contributions to the Theory of Sex • Sigmund Freud
... Vasari. A study of him is by Emile Gebhart, late of the French Academy. It is erudite, although oddly enough it ignores the researches of Morelli and Berenson. Gebhart attributes to Alessandro di Mariano Filipepi about eighty-five pictures, many of which were long ago in Morelli's taboo list—that terrible Morelli, the learned iconoclast who brought many sleepless nights to Dr. Wilhelm Bode of Berlin. Time has vindicated the Bergamese critic. Berenson will allow only forty-five originals to Botticelli's credit. Furthermore, Gebhart does not mention in his catalogue the two Botticellis ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker
... thinks to make a "hit" by pulling a live rabbit or a potted plant from the back of the mystified hostess or one of the butlers, is in reality only making a "fool" of himself if he only knew it. The same "taboo" also holds good as concerns feats of juggling and no hostess of today will, I am sure, ever issue a second invitation to a young man who has attempted to enliven her evening by balancing, on his nose, a knife, a radish, a plate of soup and a lighted candle. "Cleverness" ...
— Perfect Behavior - A Guide for Ladies and Gentlemen in all Social Crises • Donald Ogden Stewart
... lying awake with a dismal headache, and repose is taboo'd by anxiety, I conceive you may use any language you choose to indulge in, without impropriety; For your brain is on fire—the bedclothes conspire of usual slumber to plunder you: First your counterpane goes, and uncovers your toes, and your sheet slips demurely ...
— The Complete Plays of Gilbert and Sullivan - The 14 Gilbert And Sullivan Plays • William Schwenk Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan
... asking direct questions of the duellists, for if duelling, for years past, had been a subject which no delicately-minded person alluded to purposely in Major Benjy's presence, how much more now after this critical morning would that subject be taboo? That certainly was a good thing, for the duellists if closely questioned might have a different explanation, and it would be highly inconvenient to have two contradictory stories going about. But, as it was, nothing could be nicer: the whole of the rest of Tilling, under promise of secrecy, would ...
— Miss Mapp • Edward Frederic Benson
... had followed us up from the beach were not permitted to enter the palisaded enclosure, which was strictly taboo to the common herd; our party therefore now consisted solely of those who had brought me up the river, four individuals who had joined us outside the gate—and whom I took to be officials of some sort—and my unworthy self; and, for my own part, I would very ...
— A Middy of the Slave Squadron - A West African Story • Harry Collingwood
... females and dogs is taboo And I know, 'cause I've fussed with 'em all. There's only one pal that I know is true blue And it's that Thirty U.S. on the wall. She's stood by my shoulder and stopped a brown bear And she keeps the cache full in the Fall; ...
— Rhymes of a Roughneck • Pat O'Cotter
... when she took the risk of becoming his wife. That was the turning point. He had got so far that his own fast set had thrown him over. There is a world of difference, you know, between a man who drinks and a drunkard. They all drink, but they taboo a drunkard. He had become a slave to it—hopeless and helpless. Then she stepped in, saw the possibilities of a fine man in the wreck, took her chance in marrying him though she might have had the pick of a dozen, and, by devoting her life to it, brought him back to manhood ...
— Tales of Terror and Mystery • Arthur Conan Doyle
... the people of Kadalayapan and Kaodanan are warned or encouraged by omens received through the medium of birds, thunder, lightning, or the condition of the gall and liver of a slaughtered pig; [60] and like them they suffer for failure to heed these warnings, or for the infraction of a taboo. ...
— Traditions of the Tinguian: A Study in Philippine Folk-Lore • Fay-Cooper Cole
... interested in drama as a branch of art are prepared even to sacrifice a pipe or a cigar in the pursuit of their peculiar and hardly popular pleasure. Moreover, it is likely the theatres would exhibit the snobbishness of the fashionable halls and restaurants and taboo the pipe which every wise man prefers to the cigar or ...
— Our Stage and Its Critics • "E.F.S." of "The Westminster Gazette"
... has fallen to the ground here—who can say; or the stinging ants have made a home. That tree beyond is taboo to the little people, and we ...
— In Search of the Okapi - A Story of Adventure in Central Africa • Ernest Glanville
... said. "But don't snap my neck for it. I'm gambling that your civilized mind can control your reflexes. Because I have to talk about things that are strictly taboo on Pyrrus. ...
— Deathworld • Harry Harrison
... the Knight of the Swan who came to the succour of the youthful Duchess of Brabant is based upon motives more or less common in folklore—the enchantment of human beings into swans, and the taboo whereby, as in the case of Cupid and Psyche, the husband forbids the wife to question him as to his identity or to look upon him. The myth has been treated by both French and German romancers, but the latter attached it loosely to the Grail legend, ...
— Hero Tales and Legends of the Rhine • Lewis Spence
... whether you are right or wrong. Talk about public spirit! Why, there isn't an ounce of live public spirit left among you, in spite of all the moonshine your man Benham talks about the healing virtues of tradition and the sacred taboo of your political Pharisees. There wasn't one of you that didn't hate like the devil to see me Governor of Virginia—and yet how many of you took the trouble to find out what I am made of, or to understand what I mean? Did you even take the trouble ...
— One Man in His Time • Ellen Glasgow
... fail to do, having called on him already as a bachelor the year before. Nor were the Uniackes and the Invernesses the bell-wethers of the flock. Those august families had returned to London for the season; but the taboo half-suggested by Mrs. Venables had begun and ended in her own mind. Indeed, that potent and diplomatic dame, who was the undoubted leader of society within a four-mile radius of Northborough town hall, ...
— The Shadow of the Rope • E. W. Hornung
... him out of the corner of my eye. I wondered what was passing through his mind. The subject of my relations with papa was one which, without saying anything at all about it, we had consented to taboo. ...
— The Beetle - A Mystery • Richard Marsh |
