2023 Experts said there are a few ways to incorporate movement into your day and-most importantly-stick to the habit. 2023 Whether consciously or not, the most successful sleepers follow a routine when preparing to hit the hay, and there are lessons to be taken from these sorts of simple habits. Patt Morrison, Los Angeles Times, 1 Oct. 2023 Angelenos were also in the habit of burning up their household garbage in backyard incinerators. Margaret Talbot, The New Yorker, 2 Oct. Noun Besides the Trib, his great passions, if they may be called that, were civil-service reform, temperance, and habits of personal economy. As with all language, meaning is established by usage and force of habit. ![]() Our most common use of habit today, “acquired mode of behavior,” didn’t exist in Latin- habitus went from meaning “condition” to “how one conducts oneself” to “clothing.” That it was adapted into English in precisely the reverse order is an accident of history the order of meanings absorbed from one language to another rarely constitutes a logical development. In Latin, that word’s original meaning was “state of being” or “condition.” Interestingly, even though “clothing” is the oldest meaning of habit in English, it wasn’t the original meaning of the word's ultimate Latin root, habitus. The specific development of habit to refer to drug addiction began in the 19th century, with reference to opium. ![]() In English, habit progressed from meaning “clothing” to “clothing for a particular profession or purpose” to “bearing, conduct, behavior." (The word’s evolution brings to mind the old adage “the clothes make the man," which asserts that the way we dress reflects our character.)įrom “what one wears” to “how one conducts oneself,” habit continued to evolve, referring to appearance (“a man of fleshy habit”) and mental makeup (“a philosophical habit”) before, after several centuries in English, it came to mean repeated activity: “a behavior pattern acquired by frequent repetition.” ![]() Indeed, the modern French word for clothes is habits (pronounced \ah-bee\). Like so many words that appeared in English in the centuries following the Norman Conquest, habit came from French. Today, this meaning is preserved only in phrases like "nun's habit," "monk's habit," and "riding habit" (clothes worn for horseback riding). In its oldest sense, however, habit meant "clothing" and had nothing to do with the things a person does in a regular and repeated way. The word habit most often refers to a usual way of behaving or a tendency that someone has settled into, as in "good eating habits."
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