"Taboo" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... touch. 'Dear Bella,' Uncle John would say. He knew. You have heard always how he was the lover of the Princess Naomi. He was a true lover. He loved but the once. After her death they said he was eccentric. He was. He was the one lover, once and always. Remember that taboo inner room of his at Kilohana that we entered only after his death and found it his shrine to her. 'Dear Bella,' it was all he ever said to me, ...
— On the Makaloa Mat/Island Tales • Jack London
... Superior in the United 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 ...
— Animal Sanctuaries in Labrador • William Wood
... one little thing I am going to talk to you about that really is a bigger thing than it seems—and that is gum—chewing gum. If you had had stage experience you would know that gum is taboo in the theatre, and the reason for this is not only that to chew in sight of an audience would be an insult and result in immediate dismissal, but also for this very important reason, that a cud of gum if dropped on ...
— The Art of Stage Dancing - The Story of a Beautiful and Profitable Profession • Ned Wayburn
... he most deplored in the social system of his country was the power of the police and of the statistician by whom the policeman was guided. This he ascribed to the growth of great towns, to civic cowardice, and to a new taboo laid upon uniformed and labelled public authorities, who are now regarded as sacred, and also ...
— First and Last • H. Belloc
... distinction. Mrs. Langloh Parker says:(1) "The former series" (with the low Baiame myths) "were all such legends as are told to the black picaninnies; among the present are some they would not be allowed to hear, touching as they do on sacred things, taboo to the young". The blacks draw the line which I am ...
— Myth, Ritual, and Religion, Vol. 1 • Andrew Lang
... training if they are to make successful use of the opportunities placed in their hands. This training needs especially to give the parents a right point of view respecting sex and sex-instruction. At present there is a powerful taboo in most country places regarding any constructive attempt to give helpful sex information, although, as a matter of practice, conversation often gravitates toward sex in a most unwholesome fashion. The ...
— Rural Problems of Today • Ernest R. Groves
... 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 ...
— A Treasury of Eskimo Tales • Clara Kern Bayliss
... 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 ...
— Songs of a Savoyard • W. S. Gilbert
... human instinct, might be seized by those around him as evidence of inconsistency, and might lead the weaker brethren into offence. The incident of the carpenters and the comic song is typical of a condition of mind which now possessed my Father, in which act after act became taboo, not because each was sinful in itself, but because it might lead others ...
— Father and Son • Edmund Gosse
... I found I was "queering" myself. For these genial companions of mine had laid a most decided taboo upon all topics of this kind. They did so because to discuss them meant to openly think and feel, and to think or feel intensely, about anything but athletics and other things prescribed by the crowd, was bad ...
— The Harbor • Ernest Poole
... Spiritualism, and the records of scientific Psychical 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 largely liable ...
— The New Avatar and The Destiny of the Soul - The Findings of Natural Science Reduced to Practical Studies - in Psychology • Jirah D. Buck
... Bureau, Publications 42 and 77. Report of the Committee on Status and Protection of Illegitimate Children of the National Conference of Commissioners on Uniform State Laws, 1921. Normal Life, Chapter V, The Home, by Edward T. Devine. Taboo and Genetics, by Knight, Peters, and Blanchard. A Social Theory of Religious Education, Part IV, Chapter, The ...
— The Family and it's Members • Anna Garlin Spencer
... both his marriages; the first bringing him rank and connection, the second lands and wealth. I bring him in here because he associated with Forster in one of his most grotesque moods. To Forster, however, this agreeable spirit was taboo. He had offended the great man, and as it had a ludicrous cast, and was, besides, truly Forsterian, I may here recur to it. Forster, as I have stated, had been left by Landor, the copyright of his now value unsaleable writings, and he was more pleased at the intended compliment than ...
— John Forster • Percy Hethrington Fitzgerald
... the lovers to ensure one another's constancy seem very like the methods of taboo. The knot that may not or cannot be untied has many counterparts in ancient lore, and the girdle that no man but the accepted lover may loose is reminiscent of the days when a man placed such a girdle around his wife ...
— Legends & Romances of Brittany • Lewis Spence
... ideas, only still further extended, may be detected in the sacredness attached to certain animals by so many nations of antiquity. It is now generally admitted that this 'sacredness' has two sides. A sacred animal may be 'taboo,' that is, so sacred that it must not be touched, much less killed or eaten; and, on the other hand, its original sanctity may lead people to regard it as "unclean," something again to be avoided, because ...
— The Religion of Babylonia and Assyria • Morris Jastrow
... 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 ...
— Miss Mapp • Edward Frederic Benson
... of your Security badges had the wrong man attached to it, and word got back. Couldn't be helped. You just ran into the sacred law of Marsport—the one they teach kids. Be bad, and the dome'll collapse. The dome made Marsport, and it's taboo!" ...
— Police Your Planet • Lester del Rey
... drinks, in 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 ...
— Kim • Rudyard Kipling
... 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 recoil ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn, Vol. I (of 6) • Aphra Behn
... cabin—because "shure, he paid the rint"—I feel bound to take care of myself as a household animal of value, to say nothing of any other grounds. So, much as I should like to be with you all on the 3rd, I must defer to the taboo. ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 3 • Leonard Huxley
... thenceforward the subject had been taboo. Even after seven years of intimate relations, Bat was still mystified on the subject, he was ...
— The Man in the Twilight • Ridgwell Cullum
... Steels, as indeed, they could scarcely 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 ...
— The Shadow of the Rope • E. W. Hornung
... the man, The child of evolution, flings aside His swaddling-bands, the morals of the tribe, He, following his own instincts as his God, Will enter on the larger golden age; No pleasure then taboo'd: for when the tide Of full democracy has overwhelm'd This Old world, from that flood will rise the New, Like the Love-goddess, with no bridal veil, Ring, trinket of the Church, but naked Nature In all ...
— Becket and other plays • Alfred Lord Tennyson
... taboo in India against killing a snake. When a cobra is slain it is supposed that its mate always avenges its death (Crooke, "Popular Religion and Folk-lore of ...
— The Talking Thrush - and Other Tales from India • William Crooke
... sense is large, as New Yorkers know ever since he wound up an artistic tour of America with a concert in a department store. When Nietszche was the talk of Germany we got "Also Sprach Zarathustra." Oscar Wilde's play, too unsavory for the France for which it was written, taboo in England because of its subject, has been joyously acclaimed in Germany, where there are many men who are theoretically licentious and practically uxorious; and Strauss was willing that his countrymen should sup to their full of ...
— Chapters of Opera • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... 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, I'll drink your ...
— A Thousand and One Afternoons in Chicago • Ben Hecht
... club-house, where 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
... this mass of misery and ignorance covered over and clamped down by a taboo of silence, imposed by the horrible superstition of sex-prudery! George went out from the doctor's office trembling with excitement over this situation. Oh, why had not some one warned him in time? Why didn't the doctors and the teachers lift up their voices and ...
— Damaged Goods - A novelization of the play "Les Avaries" • Upton Sinclair
... steered for Amsterdam or Tonga Taboo. The natives welcomed them with white flags. When Cook landed, their chief Attago conducted him over part of the country; and so fair was its aspect, that he could fancy himself transported into the ...
— Notable Voyagers - From Columbus to Nordenskiold • W.H.G. Kingston and Henry Frith
... homely, simple dialect-melodies is due, for all current and future readers, to the poet's personal "errors," the general bleakness of his lot, his ingrain'd pensiveness, his brief dash into dazzling, tantalizing, evanescent sunshine—finally culminating in those last years of his life, his being taboo'd and in debt, sick and sore, yaw'd as by contending gales, deeply dissatisfied with everything, most of all with himself—high-spirited too—(no man ever really higher-spirited than Robert Burns.) I think it a perfectly ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... fairly striking 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 it. With ...
— David Copperfield • Charles Dickens
... was Taboo among these Good People, although Father could Fletcherize about 10 cents' worth of Licorice ...
— Ade's Fables • George Ade
... trunks were taboo," she explained. "I only had one valise and I couldn't nearly get everything in. Indeed I sat up half the night studying how ...
— Two on the Trail - A Story of the Far Northwest • Hulbert Footner
... 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, could not only lampoon a hero, but infuse their compositions with ...
— Elves and Heroes • Donald A. MacKenzie
... 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 low and narrow natures which can find vent for their love disappointments ...
— Dr. Heidenhoff's Process • Edward Bellamy
... controversies. Law and order have become stock phrases, dinned into their ears at every turn. The man who would settle his difficulty by trying the physical metal of his adversary is of the past. By the new order he is taboo as a savage. Individual self-restraint rings out in our vocabulary as nationally descriptive. The babe at the mother's knee learns first the virtue of it; the child at school is tutored to it soundly; the man in life is lectured with ...
— Prize Orations of the Intercollegiate Peace Association • Intercollegiate Peace Association
... associations which appear to be 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 ...
— The Siouan Indians • W. J. McGee
... phrase, "And the Lord will repay you many fold." In other words, sacrifice part of your worldly goods to the idol, and he will repay with high interest. He will give in return long life and much riches. The savage was afraid to utter the real name of his god, it was taboo. The modern says, "Take not the name of the Lord in vain." Even today, the followers of Moses consider it taboo to utter the name of ...
— The Necessity of Atheism • Dr. D.M. Brooks
... preservation of the unbroken, self-conscious existence of the white or dominant ethnic group is synonymous with the preservation of all that has meaning and inspiration in its past and hope for its future. It forbids by law, therefore, or by the equally effective social taboo, anything that would tend to contaminate the purity of its stock or jeopardize the integrity ...
— Applied Eugenics • Paul Popenoe and Roswell Hill Johnson
... relieved and triumphant as an obstetrician after a hard case, and meekly handed over to Dinkie anything his Royal Highness desired, even to his fifth cookie and the entire contents of my sewing-basket, which under ordinary circumstances is strictly taboo. But once the ear-passage was clear the pain went away, and Dinkie, at the end of a couple of hours, ...
— The Prairie Mother • Arthur Stringer
... who were bound for the suburbs. The first person to recognize him was the station agent at Bransford and his greeting was casual as he trundled the truck of empty milk cans to the far end of the platform. "Maybe these London tweeds are taboo in this central zone," he grumbled as he made his way up the shaded ...
— David Lannarck, Midget - An Adventure Story • George S. Harney
... food taboo, was taken off a different kind of food for boys at each Boorah, until at last they could eat what they pleased except their yunbeai, or individual familiar: their Dhe, or family totem, was never ...
— The Euahlayi Tribe - A Study of Aboriginal Life in Australia • K. Langloh Parker
... be tapu." It is impossible to explain tapu in a note; we have it as an English word, taboo. Suffice it, that a thing which was tapu must not be touched, nor a place ...
— Ballads • Robert Louis Stevenson
... with the gaiety of truant 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 ...
— The Joyous Adventures of Aristide Pujol • William J. Locke
... never have been changed. Small blame is ours For this unsexing of ourselves, and worse. Effeminising 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 divinely ...
— Poems of Power • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... 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 began ...
— The Story of The American Legion • George Seay Wheat
... cravat and wristbands to his knuckles, and goeth forth to breakfast. And to breakfast with whom but his near neighbours, the Lammles of Sackville Street, who have imparted to him that he will meet his distant kinsman, Mr Fledgely. The awful Snigsworth might taboo and prohibit Fledgely, but the peaceable Twemlow reasons, If he IS my kinsman I didn't make him so, and to meet a man is not to ...
— Our Mutual Friend • Charles Dickens
... who you are"—he was speaking, but he did not seem to recognise his own voice—"the hundred other things I've sworn I'd make you explain when I found you, are all taboo as ...
— The Adventures of Jimmie Dale • Frank L. Packard
... Headquarters suddenly rolls off; and, after two or three days, it returns noiselessly, with its archives, its general staff, its restaurant, and its electric plant. The Grand Duke rules with an iron fist. Champagne and liquor is taboo throughout the war zone, and even the officers of the general staff get nothing except a little red wine. Woe to anyone who sins against this order, here or anywhere else at the front. The iron fist of the Grand Duke hits, if necessary, even the greatest, ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume II (of VIII) - History of the European War from Official Sources • Various
... like Madame's monopolizes the bay, we less gifted mortals must even twine myrtle leaves, or else humbly bow, bare of chaplets. But may I ask why you so sternly taboo that social world which you are so pre-eminently fitted to grace and adorn? When your worshippers are wellnigh frenzied with delight, watching you beyond the footlights, you cruelly withdraw behind the impenetrable curtain of seclusion; and only at rare intervals ...
— Infelice • Augusta Jane Evans Wilson
... flustered by a lovely buck, would yield to that madness for an instant, or confess it to her dearest friend. Women know how little such purely superficial values are worth. The voice of their order, the first taboo of their freemasonry, is firmly against making a sentimental debauch of the ...
— In Defense of Women • H. L. Mencken
... managed an 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 under the table so ...
— Mary Wollaston • Henry Kitchell Webster
... Archangel roubles, better known as British roubles. Needless to say there was a great speculation in money and exchange. Nickolai and Kerensky and Archangel and British guaranteed roubles tumbled over one another in the market. Of course trafficking in money was taboo but ...
— The History of the American Expedition Fighting the Bolsheviki - Campaigning in North Russia 1918-1919 • Joel R. Moore
... 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 come off to ...
— Omoo: Adventures in the South Seas • Herman Melville
... "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
... on the trail. "Tapu," it said, which means taboo, or keep away; and farther on a notice in French that the owner forbade any one to ...
— Mystic Isles of the South Seas. • Frederick O'Brien
... convention, of 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
... 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 too ...
— Inca Land - Explorations in the Highlands of Peru • Hiram Bingham
... feet, 4-6; sacred persons apparently thought to be charged with a mysterious virtue which will run to waste or explode by contact with the ground, 6 sq.; things as well as persons charged with the mysterious virtue of holiness or taboo and therefore kept from contact with the ground, 7; festival of the wild mango, which is not allowed to touch the earth, 7-11; other sacred objects kept from contact with the ground, 11 sq.; sacred food not allowed to touch the earth, 13 sq.; magical implements and ...
— Balder The Beautiful, Vol. I. • Sir James George Frazer
... rivals, Prof. von Possenfeller and Dr. Smithlawn were devoted personal friends. They called each other Possy and Smithy and got together once a week to play chess and exchange views on the universe in general. Only one subject was taboo ...
— When I Grow Up • Richard E. Lowe
... 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 on my brow. Child! child! what ...
— My Novel, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... not mention stolen horses, nor thieves, nor airplanes, nor anything that could possibly lead his thoughts to those taboo subjects. Under that heavy handicap conversation lagged. There seemed to be so little that she dared mention! She would sit and prattle of school and shows and such things, and tell him about the girls she knew; and half ...
— Skyrider • B. M. Bower
... 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 things had ...
— Rimrock Jones • Dane Coolidge
... Kanelba could not be prevailed upon to visit it on the day of the snake hunt to the east in 1895, on the ground that no one not a member of the society should be seen there or take water from it at that time. This is probably a phase of the taboo of all work in the world-quarter in which the snake hunts occur, when the Snake priests are engaged in capturing these reptilian ...
— Archeological Expedition to Arizona in 1895 • Jesse Walter Fewkes
... dangerous class are confined first in the 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 prison for dangerous Confederates; and here later three ...
— Influences of Geographic Environment - On the Basis of Ratzel's System of Anthropo-Geography • Ellen Churchill Semple
... interposed the 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 ...
— The Damnation of Theron Ware • Harold Frederic
... revolution, and he suffices for the small "spiritual wants" of his flock. He has charge of the "Kizila," the "Chigella" of Merolla and the "Quistilla" of James Barbot—Anglice putting things in fetish, which corresponds with the Tahitian tapu or taboo. The African idea is, that he who touches the article, for instance, gold on the eastern coast of Guinea, will inevitably come to grief. When "fetish is taken off," as by the seller of palm wine who tastes it in presence of the buyer, the precaution is evidently against ...
— Two Trips to Gorilla Land and the Cataracts of the Congo Volume 2 • Richard F. Burton
... Religion' 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 ...
— The Wallypug in London • G. E. Farrow
... which was as if he said, "May I be buried immediately if what I say is not true." But there was another and more extensive class of curses, which were also feared, and formed a powerful check on stealing, especially from plantations and fruit-trees, viz. the silent hieroglyphic taboo, or tapui (tapooe), as they call it. Of this there was a great variety, and ...
— Samoa, A Hundred Years Ago And Long Before • George Turner
... taboo touched David that Dick was resentful, and then he was inclined to question the wisdom of his return. It hurt him, for instance, to see David give up his church, and reading morning prayer alone at home on Sunday mornings, and ...
— The Breaking Point • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... together, and you cause a terrible frictional excitement and jarring. It is this instinctive recognition of the different dynamic vibrations from different centers, in different modes, and in different directions of positive and negative, which lies at the base of savage taboo. After puberty, members of one family should be taboo to one another. There should be the most definite limits to the degree of contact. And mothers-in-law should be taboo to their daughters' husbands, and fathers-in-law ...
— Fantasia of the Unconscious • D. H. Lawrence
... 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. These, in turn, would have seemed ...
— Rastignac the Devil • Philip Jose Farmer
... for some time. The beard would be gone, to be sure; but there'd be all the rest to tattle—eyes, voice, size, manner, walk—everything; and smoked glasses couldn't cover all that, you know. Besides, glasses would be taboo, anyway. They'd only result in making me look more like John Smith than ever. John Smith, you remember, wore smoked glasses for some time to hide Mr. Stanley G. Fulton from the ubiquitous reporter. No, Mr. Stanley G. Fulton can't ...
— Oh, Money! Money! • Eleanor Hodgman Porter
... interest 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 needs of the ...
— The Making of Arguments • J. H. Gardiner
... was well managed; we were wholesomely fed; but there had grown up a strange kind of taboo about many of the things we were supposed to eat. I had a healthy appetite, but the tradition was that all the food was unutterably bad, adulterated, hocussed. The theory was that one must just eat enough to sustain life. There was, for ...
— Escape and Other Essays • Arthur Christopher Benson
... there is a good reason for it and then it should be done with apologies. It is not courteous to ask a great many questions and personal ones are always taboo. One should be careful not to use over and over and over again the same words and phrases and one should not fall in the habit of asking people to repeat their remarks. Argument should be avoided and contradicting is always discourteous. When it seems that a heated disagreement ...
— Book of Etiquette • Lillian Eichler
... world is usually quite right. It must cast out whoever menaces the unity of the group. For in this unity is its security, it is sacred, holy, 'taboo,' as the Polynesians say. And it cannot possibly investigate each particular case, whether the seceder is perhaps a faithful follower of Christ, a truly original spirit or simply an eccentric fool or weakling. That the ...
— The Bride of Dreams • Frederik van Eeden
... again, still more at sea. "And are there any special ceremonies to be gone through on taking up lodgings?" he asked quite gravely. "Any religious rites, I mean to say? Any poojah or so forth? That is," he went on, as Philip's smile broadened, "is there any taboo to be removed or appeased before I can take up my ...
— The British Barbarians • Grant Allen
... all wives promise that kind of thing before marriage. And there is apt to come a day when the familiar bachelor friend falls under the domestic taboo, together with smoking in the drawing-room, brandy-and-soda, and other luxuries of the ...
— Fenton's Quest • M. E. Braddon
... say, "he is a man like us, yet in his nature and appearance godlike. And he was the first-born of us; he was greatly beloved by our parents; to him was given superhuman power—ka mana—which we have not.... Only his taboo rank remains, Therefore fear not; when he comes you will see that he is only a man like us." It is such a character, born of godlike ancestors and inheriting through the favor of this god, or some member ...
— The Hawaiian Romance Of Laieikawai • Anonymous
... the Russians, like other envoys, in Chinese phrase "came lean and went away fat." But they were not allowed to leave the beaten track: they were merchants, not travellers. Not till the removal of the taboo within the last half-century have these outlying dependencies been explored by men like Richthofen and Sven Hedin. Formerly the makers of ...
— The Awakening of China • W.A.P. Martin
... his partner provided themselves with some dice and several hundred dollars in gold coin. With these they began shooting craps on the sidewalk in front of their office. Now gambling was taboo, hence the spectacle of two expensively dressed, eminently prosperous men squatting upon their heels with a stack of double eagles before them caused a sensation, and people halted to witness their impending ...
— Flowing Gold • Rex Beach
... you," said Aurelle, "that his taboo is still effective. On the platform before he arrived there were three A.P.M.'s bustling about and chasing away the few spectators. As the train came into the station one of them ran up to me and said, 'Are you the interpreter on duty? Well, ...
— General Bramble • Andre Maurois
... of 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. The influence ...
— A Handbook of Ethical Theory • George Stuart Fullerton
... 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 I think I have succeeded in my aim, but because I have tried to succeed ...
— The Letters of the Younger Pliny - Title: The Letters of Pliny the Younger - - Series 1, Volume 1 • Pliny the Younger
... a warning given once: No tree, on pain of withering and sawfly, To reach the slimmest of his snaky toes Into this mounded sward and rumple it; All trees stand back: taboo is ...
— Georgian Poetry 1920-22 • Various
... I said slowly, "the thing that keeps a woman straight and a man faithful is not a matter of bricks and mortar nor ways of thinking nor habits of living. It's something finer and stronger than these. It's the magic taboo of her love for him and his for her that makes them—sacred. With that to ...
— In the Bishop's Carriage • Miriam Michelson
... 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 ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 26, October, 1880 • Various
... 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 ...
— A Middy of the Slave Squadron - A West African Story • Harry Collingwood
... are well brought up, girls, you will not loiter on the street to talk to one another; much less to boys. Street visiting is taboo. ...
— Manners And Conduct In School And Out • Anonymous
... hosts. En route to the interior. Native flora and fauna. We arrive at the capital. A lecture on Filbertine architecture. A strange taboo. The serenade. ...
— The Cruise of the Kawa • Walter E. Traprock
... this law goes back to a remote antiquity and is involved in obscurity, it seems to have been originally simply a matter of social agreement. It came to be, however, connected with systems of totemism and taboo, and thus to have acquired a certain religious character; and, as being important for the tribal life, it would come under the control of the tribal god when there is such a god. A similar remark may be made in regard to exogamy. Why marriage between members of the same tribe, clan, or phratry ...
— Introduction to the History of Religions - Handbooks on the History of Religions, Volume IV • Crawford Howell Toy
... his bets if he did not choose to do so. Finally, the jack-pot assumed altogether too large dimensions for the party, Kipling "called" and Bok, true to the old idea of "beginner's luck" in cards, laid down a royal flush! This was too much, and poker, with Bok in it, was taboo from that moment. Kipling's version of this card-playing does not agree in all particulars with the version here written. "Bok learned the game of poker," Kipling says; "had the deck stacked on him, and on hearing that there was a woman aboard who read The Ladies' ...
— The Americanization of Edward Bok - The Autobiography of a Dutch Boy Fifty Years After • Edward William Bok (1863-1930)
... spent a restless and rather disturbing evening. It would start from the reading desk at which he stood and fall to the points of that vast waistcoat which inspired the description of him as "a fellow of infinite vest." It would wander aimlessly a moment about his—stomach is a word that is taboo among the polite English—equator, and then shift swiftly to the rear until the thumb found the hip pocket. There the hand would rest a moment, to return again to the reading desk and to describe once more the quarter circle. ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... significance. Then again the talk of schoolboys is wholly immature and shapeless. They cannot express themselves, and moreover there is a very strict and peremptory convention which dictates what may be talked about and what may not. No society in the world is under so oppressive a taboo. They must not speak of anything emotional or intellectual, at the cost of being thought a fool or a prig. They talk about games, they gossip about boys and masters, sometimes their conversation is nasty and bestial. But it conceals very real if very fitful emotions; yet ...
— Where No Fear Was - A Book About Fear • Arthur Christopher Benson
... to luggage) in a small craft of this description was an exceedingly tight pack, and we had to strictly taboo any skylarking, else we should very quickly have got a ducking. At Garstang we left our friends, after a high tea; and after passing several towns and villages, at eventide reached Lancaster, which we made ...
— Through Canal-Land in a Canadian Canoe • Vincent Hughes
... can find, any way on earth you want it, only in my room. That is taboo, as I told you. What am I ...
— The Harvester • Gene Stratton Porter
... speech, and the debt of primitive 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 for ...
— The Child and Childhood in Folk-Thought • Alexander F. Chamberlain
... the zeal of the young novelist Jonas Lie, who, to his great honor, bought for about L35 the right to publish it as a supplement to a newspaper that he was editing. Then the storm broke out; the press was unanimously adverse, and in private circles abuse amounted almost to a social taboo. In 1862 the second theatre became bankrupt, and Ibsen was thrown on the world, the most unpopular man of his day, and crippled with debts. It is true that he was engaged at the Christiania Theatre at a nominal salary of about ...
— Henrik Ibsen • Edmund Gosse
... had been a little shy of being handed down to fame; so I adopted the ruse of getting into Herr Gustav Kuester's corps of fiddlers for the occasion. However, I must in fairness add that the committee during the evening withdrew the taboo they had formerly placed on my writing. I was free to immortalize them; and my fiddling was ...
— Mystic London: - or, Phases of occult life in the metropolis • Charles Maurice Davies
... 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 consented, nobody would pay; 'tis a farce, ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 25 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... 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 Waterloo, ...
— Adventures among Books • Andrew Lang
... Several waterholes are taboo as bathing-places. They are said to be haunted by Kurreah, which swallow their victims whole, or by Gowargay, the featherless emu, who sucks down in a whirlpool any one who dares ...
— The Euahlayi Tribe - A Study of Aboriginal Life in Australia • K. Langloh Parker
... 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
... every ruin whose walls are still standing contains one or more, some have eight or ten. They are all of Navaho origin and in many of them the remains of Navaho dead may still be seen. Possibly the Navaho taboo of their own dead has brought about the partial taboo of the cliff dwellers' remains which prevails, and which is an element that must be taken into account in any discussion of the ...
— The Cliff Ruins of Canyon de Chelly, Arizona • Cosmos Mindeleff
... 12th, the ships were put under a taboo, by the chiefs: a solemnity, it seems, that was requisite to be observed, before Kariopoo, the king, paid his first visit to Captain Cook, after his return. He waited upon him the same day, on board ...
— Narrative of the Voyages Round The World, • A. Kippis
... awkward, burning questions, which put its seniors in a flutter. The seniors, under question, discover that they have no body of doctrine, and have never till now dreamt of the need of any. If they are wise, they will put away the taboo on politics and sit down with their juniors to hammer these things out, and perchance clear their own ...
— The School and the World • Victor Gollancz and David Somervell
... taboo are that even very little children are often made unhappy and anxious, sometimes for days, if they know there is sickness at home, while in the second place boxes are so often delayed that they become the source of much disturbance ...
— What the Mother of a Deaf Child Ought to Know • John Dutton Wright
... sacred to 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 ...
— The Mind in the Making - The Relation of Intelligence to Social Reform • James Harvey Robinson
... prophesy; but, whether such a result comes soon or late, the credit of having accomplished it will not be due to those "half-learned and parcel-learned" persons who consider the present written form of the language as a thing "taboo," and look with such horror upon all ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 85, November, 1864 • Various
... branch, the evil growth of man's supremacy. I saw that the honorableness of marriage, the disgrace of free union, were just so many ignoble masculine devices to keep up man's lordship; vile results of his determination to taboo to himself beforehand and monopolize for life some particular woman. I know all that; I acknowledge all that. I see as plainly as you do that sooner or later there must come a revolution. But, Herminia, the women who devote themselves to carrying out ...
— The Woman Who Did • Grant Allen
... subsidized by the government and one by the municipality. The performances are almost exclusively in Hungarian, the exceptions being the occasional appearance of French, Italian and other foreign artists. Performances in German are under a popular taboo, and they are never given ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 3 - "Brescia" to "Bulgaria" • Various
... that I would either follow, or that perhaps Mudge would manage by some means or other to obtain my liberty, should he not already have left the island. There was some risk of this being the case, we agreed; and if so, Harry said that he would come back to me rather than have to live alone in Taboo Land, as we ...
— Twice Lost • W.H.G. Kingston
... tried to make myself over-righteous. I have not put forward my name for exalted positions. I have not entreated servants evilly. I have not defrauded the man who was in trouble. I have not done what is hateful (or taboo) to the gods. I have not caused a servant to be ill-treated by his master. I have not caused pain [to any man]. I have not permitted any man to go hungry. I have made none to weep. I have not committed murder. I have not ordered any man to commit murder ...
— The Literature of the Ancient Egyptians • E. A. Wallis Budge
... purpose. Flint is invariably selected, and for months the children 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 ...
— The Child Under Eight • E.R. Murray and Henrietta Brown Smith
... may be new to most of our readers, has long been current in the Far West, and is likely to be adopted into the language, and become as indispensable as the typic words taboo and tabooed, which Herman Melville gave us some forty years ago. There grows upon the deserts and the cattle ranges of the Rockies a plant of the leguminosae family, with a purple blossom, which is called the 'loco'. ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... (more or less unconscious) working of the mind as that caused by some unexpected neglect of those social "taboos" or laws of behaviour which we call modesty, decency, and propriety. They either cause indignation and resentment in the onlooker at the neglect of respect for the taboo, or, on the contrary, the natural man, long oppressed by pomposity or by the fetters of propriety imposed by society, suddenly feels a joyous sense of escape from his bonds, and bursts into laughter—the laughter of a return to vitality and nature—which is enormously encouraged ...
— More Science From an Easy Chair • Sir E. Ray (Edwin Ray) Lankester
... 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
... keenly 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 cigarette ...
— Our Stage and Its Critics • "E.F.S." of "The Westminster Gazette"
... 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
... and the negroes have submitted to that prohibition as to many others, through countless generations, with excellent grace. So accustomed were they to interdicts of nature that they added many of their own through conventional taboo, some of them intended to prevent the eating of supposedly injurious food, others calculated to keep the commonalty from infringing upon the ...
— American Negro Slavery - A Survey of the Supply, Employment and Control of Negro Labor as Determined by the Plantation Regime • Ulrich Bonnell Phillips
... 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
... of this mental snobbery. And the moral equivalent of this is the fear of being found in the company of an opinion that has been branded as immoral. Such people have all the fear of an unpopular opinion that a savage has of a tribal taboo—it is, in fact, a survival of the same spirit that gave the tribal taboo its force. It is, thus, not a very difficult matter to warn people off an undesirable opinion. Samuel Taylor Coleridge relates how the clergy raised the ...
— Theism or Atheism - The Great Alternative • Chapman Cohen
... other's 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
... 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 ...
— Out of the Primitive • Robert Ames Bennet
... wide but squalid streets, for in native capitals, though Dutch cleanliness may enforce perpetual "tidying up," the lacking sense of order produces a strange impermanence in the conditions insisted upon. The inner court of the Sultan's Kraton, or Royal Enclosure, is now taboo to visitors, for the barbaric monarch, on the plea of age and infirmity, has obtained the privilege of privacy, and the Palace can only be seen through a personal interview. The outer courts are accessible to carriages, which make the square-mile circuit of the spacious quadrangles. ...
— Through the Malay Archipelago • Emily Richings
... Wesleyan Missionaries established themselves in these islands in 1821, and are reported to have met with considerable success. The leading island is that which is called Tongataboo, or the 'consecrated island.' The name is properly two words 'Tonga Taboo,' signifying 'Sacred Island,' the reason of which appellative will appear, when I tell you that the priest of this island, whose name was Diatonga, was reverenced and resorted to by all the surrounding islands. Earthquakes are very frequent here; but the islands display a spectacle of the most ...
— The World of Waters - A Peaceful Progress o'er the Unpathed Sea • Mrs. David Osborne
... law and order without the parade of any force or badgering, judging from the assiduity with which they studied our methods. Even the "drunks"—and they were not strangers to Ruhleben, despite the fact that alcoholic liquor was religiously taboo, the liquor being smuggled in and paid heavily for, a bottle of Red Seal costing fifteen shillings—never gave us the slightest cause ...
— Sixteen Months in Four German Prisons - Wesel, Sennelager, Klingelputz, Ruhleben • Henry Charles Mahoney
... ten pounds. His hair was kinky and negroid, and he was black. He was peculiarly black. He was neither blue-black nor purple-black, but plum-black. His name was Mauki, and he was the son of a chief. He had three tambos. Tambo is Melanesian for taboo, and is first cousin to that Polynesian word. Mauki's three tambos were as follows: First, he must never shake hands with a woman, nor have a woman's hand touch him or any of his personal belongings; secondly, he must never eat clams ...
— South Sea Tales • Jack London |
