Knuckle-cracking or nail-biting

Usage examples of habit.

Gross speaks of a man of thirty who was in the habit of giving exhibitions of sword-swallowing in public houses, and who injured his esophagus to such an extent as to cause abscess and death.

Jacuzzi, absently squeezing the tennis ball he still absently squeezes out of habit.

Fred were in the habit of sexually and sadistically abusing young girls in the cellar of their house for their joint pleasure.

At her house I made the acquaintance of several gamblers, and of three or four frauleins who, without any dread of the Commissaries of Chastity, were devoted to the worship of Venus, and were so kindly disposed that they were not afraid of lowering their nobility by accepting some reward for their kindness--a circumstance which proved to me that the Commissaries were in the habit of troubling only the girls who did not frequent good houses.

I was then in the habit of calling sometimes upon Lucrezia in the morning, and of visiting in the evening Father Georgi, who was acquainted with the excursion to Frascati, and had not expressed any dissatisfaction.

Their attachment also to the ancient royal family had been much weakened by their habits of submission to the Danish princes, and by their late election of Harold or their acquiescence in his usurpation.

Over a century after coca was taxed by the clergy, we still find reports of its satanic influences, and it is just such reports that, blindly cited by later commentators, would help to propagate the myth of coca chewing as a dangerous, addictive habit - a myth that survives to this day.

I have never seen this adventurer without his being in a desperate state of impecuniosity, but he would never learn to abate his luxurious habits, and always managed to find some way or other out of his difficulties.

From the habit of fifty years all this had a physically agitating effect on the old general.

On these same plains of La Plata, we see the agouti and bizcacha, animals having nearly the same habits as our hares and rabbits and belonging to the same order of Rodents, but they plainly display an American type of structure.

Annamaria Roccaro was the last to get into position, smiling in apology as she crowded next to Aiken Drum and felt the hard tools in his pockets pressing through the sleeves and skirts of her habit.

In spite of the odd hours they kept, Alec found it difficult not to break the habit of rising with the sun.

It was more agreeable to watch the clouds while the horses rested at the end of the furrow, to address, as did Burns, lines to a field-mouse, or to listen to the song of the meadow-lark, than to learn the habits of the three dimensions then known, of points in motion, of lines in intersection, of surfaces in revolution, or to represent the unknown by algebraic instead of poetic symbols.

He said that men cured in this way, and enabled to discard the grape system, never afterward got over the habit of talking as if they were dictating to a slow amanuensis, because they always made a pause between each two words while they sucked the substance out of an imaginary grape.

The pheasant, partridge too, I believe, has the habit of feeding on mountain laurel which produces high levels of the poison andromedotoxin in its flesh.