Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: June 24, 2025
Atkin afterwards said he thought he caught the word 'Tabu, as if in warning, and saw a basket with yams and other fruits presented; and those acquainted with the customs of the Polynesians -the race to which these islanders belonged say that this is sometimes done that an intended victim may unconsciously touch something tabu, and thus may become a lawful subject for a blow, and someone may have tried to warn him.
The tabu would have been communicated by the contact of his hands, and so would have made anything touched by him unfit for human food. But the tabu is itself a derivative of the unworthiness or moral incompatibility of labour; so that even when construed in this sense the conduct of the Polynesian chiefs is truer to the canon of honorific leisure than would at first appear.
This old sanctuary was sacred to all even to rebels in arms and invading armies. Once within its walls, and confession made to the priest and absolution obtained, the wretch with a price upon his head could go forth without fear and without danger he was tabu, and to harm him was death.
One wonders how it was invented among such a people, or who it was that first had genius enough to insist on obedience, to make rules, to prescribe the tabu, and, in short, to evolve order out of chaos.
Even the revelation brought about by the discovery of a forgotten letter or bundle of letters is not an infrequent incident of daily life. Why should it be tabu on the stage? Because the French dramatist, forty years ago, would sometimes construct a Chinese-puzzle play around some stolen letter or hidden document, are we to suffer no "scrap of paper" to play any part whatever in English drama?
I was seated beside Bill, and asked him the reason of this. "It is beneath his dignity, I believe, to feed himself," answered Bill; "but I daresay he's not particular, except on great occasions. They've a strange custom among them, Ralph, which is called tabu, and they carry it to great lengths.
Among the Kafirs the women have come to speak a different dialect from the men, because words resembling the names of their lords or male relatives are in like manner "tabu."
Prescription ends by making labour not only disreputable in the eyes of the community, but morally impossible to the noble, freeborn man, and incompatible with a worthy life. This tabu on labour has a further consequence in the industrial differentiation of classes.
When they discovered that she was affiliated more or less with fashionable society, nurse though she might be, and that those frivolous and negligible beings were not only buying her book by the ton but giving her luncheons and dinners and teas, their disgust knew no bounds and they tacitly agreed that she should be tabu in the only circles where recognition counted.
By the tabu, all these were sacred to the men; the women spent their lives longing for them and wondering what they might taste like; and they died without finding out. These rules, as you see, were quite simple and clear. It was easy to remember them; and useful. For the penalty for infringing any rule in the whole list was death.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking