Word: formalizes
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...plot twists have been all too real for the Russian-born American citizen who took a term off from Harvard Divinity School (HDS) and was soon holding himself to a 27-day hunger strike while waiting for formal charges to descend...
...Voltaire. In a clever and deliberate manner, leavened by the wit and joie de vivre the French so adored, he portrayed the American cause, through his own personification of it, as that of the natural state fighting the corrupted one. He made a point of eschewing powdered wigs and formal dress, instead wearing a fur cap he had picked up years earlier on a trip to Canada. The cap, like that worn by Rousseau, served as his badge of homespun purity and virtue, just as his ever present spectacles became an emblem of wisdom. It helped him play the part...
When Franklin visited Versailles to receive the King's formal assent to the treaties, he declined to wear the ceremonial sword and regalia that were considered de rigueur at court. Seeing no reason to abandon the simple style that had served him well, he dressed in a plain brown suit with his famous spectacles as his only adornment. His one fashion concession was that he did not wear his fur cap and instead carried a hat of pure white under his arm. "Is that white hat a symbol of liberty?" asked an aristocratic woman at whose salon Franklin had worn...
...category of Bar Mitzvah ("son of the commandments") dates to the 2nd century; its formal celebration by Jewish boys goes back 500 years. Bat ("daughter") Mitzvahs, however, arose in the early 1900s and saturated liberal Judaism only in the 1970s. Inevitably, there was a generation of Jewish women who had fought for women's equal ritual participation but had themselves missed out on Bat Mitzvah training. "They got all these rights," says Lisa Grant, a professor of Jewish education at Hebrew Union College in Manhattan, "and realized that [ritually] they couldn't do anything. They felt like frauds...
...during the Civil War as a replacement call to mark the day’s end. Up until that point, lights-out was marked by an elaborate tune borrowed from the French. But in July 1862, Union General Daniel A. Butterfield decided his brigade was deserving of a less formal signal. While his regiment was stationed at Harrison’s Landing, Va., following the Seven Day’s battle, he called bugler Oliver W. Norton into his tent and had him play a few notes he had scribbled on the back of an envelope. Butterfield revised the tune...