In private and in public, we make no claims to success or cite "glimmers of hope", for fear of tempting fate.
Instead, cultures are more likely to differ in their access to and reliance on abstract rules that over-ride such automatic associations Thus, even those of who don't think we're superstitious have a reflexive fear of tempting fate.
In vintage Johnson style, he references Gray's Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard, in which the poet meditates on the talent that lies unremarked in the surrounding sod - no fear of that fate now that Gormley's project is on the go, he implies.
With only two wins in their last 10 games, Kilmarnock are playing like a side in fear of their fate.
Yet one of the reasons for this is due to fear of a fate similar to what has occurred in the places where change has taken place, as well as fear of a future of division and fragmentation.
She wrote poignantly of her fears of the fate of the ageing woman, later again exhaustively exploring the cultural patterns of ageing, detailing the innumerable ways in which its humiliations are so distinctly a cultural as much as a personal affair.
Those gains, however, have raised fears of the fate of the remaining Yazidi women, men, and children in IS custody — a number the UN puts at around 3,000.
Although it took him some 21 years to fashion 22 Hollywood films, arguably at least half of them are noirish masterpieces of menace tone poems of fear and fate that have stood the test of time.
As an obsessive joke teller, I live in fear of a similar fate.
I have always had an animal fear of death, a fate I rank second only to having to sit through a rock concert.
Until now, like the Kurds, these big border tribes have sat on the fence, unwilling to turn against Assad too early for fear of sharing the fate of the Shia of southern Iraq who rose up against Saddam Hussein in 1991 thinking they had US support, only to find they were on their own and massacred by the Iraqi Republican Guard.
