In Joe Wright's version of "Anna Karenina," the heroine is a wild bird in a gilded, highly stylized cage, a modern spirit imprisoned by archaic custom.
"The Second Amendment isn't some archaic custom that matters only to rural Americans, who find solace in firearms out of frustration with their economic circumstances.
A Berkeley grocer is a man who preserves such an archaic custom not in spite of the fact but exactly because it's an outmoded and cumbersome way of running a business.
Yet I was being asked to spend up to an hour waiting to rejoin the men.'' She told Alsop that ''I was sure he would understand if I quietly left when the women were dismissed.'' The archaic custom ended at Alsop's that night -- and everywhere else in Washington shortly thereafter.
How could the nine, cloistered behind velvety rose curtains, marble pillars and archaic customs, possibly assess the potential effects of gay marriage?
And Lyall's report on the 1998 parliamentary debate over the Blair government's proposal to rid the House of Lords of hereditary peers captures that body's sketch-comedy lunacy: the "byzantine rules, archaic customs, superfluous pageantry and doddering legislators".
According to Girls Not Brides – a global partnership of more than 450 civil society organisations committed to ending child marriage – up to 142 million children will be married by the end of the decade if there is no intervention in some of the archaic customs of communities across the world.
Just a few years earlier faith that one's Wall Street employer was engaged in some higher activity had seemed like principle; now it was just another one of those archaic customs, along with the edict against borrowing money you couldn't clearly repay and the belief that the customer was always right.
And the authorities often come, judge and sentence without checking the facts". "We are very humble people with archaic customs.
Her value, as a virgin, is ascertained not by the young groom on the wedding night but, according to archaic folk custom, by the probing finger of a tribal crone: Eberstadt's partially renegade Gypsy friend Linda explains, "For Gypsies, it's a nasty old woman who is paid to penetrate the girl, like a gynecologist but with dirty hands, in front of all the husband's family.
** Her value, as a virgin, is ascertained not by the young groom on the wedding night but, according to archaic folk custom, by the probing finger of a tribal crone: Eberstadt's partially renegade Gypsy friend Linda explains, "For Gypsies, it's a nasty old woman who is paid to penetrate the girl, like a gynecologist but with dirty hands, in front of all the husband's family.
