Folk way

He [Van Wyck Brooks] had opposed to the folkways the standard of the humanistic life. It was needful that he continue to affirm that standard by making it visible in his own spiritual manner, by living boldly, dangerously, in the fashion of the artist, by giving himself to life as men in America had never dared give themselves. But it seems that for some reason he has shrunk from continuing the challenge.

By the time you are grown up and can consider the folk-ways of your childhood with detached impersonality, you have forgotten what was of most value. Rarely will a child tell frankly of his lore, and rarely can an adult remember.

[I]f he wishes to continue the memories of the past and his Jewish personality, the Jew must assume the obligations incumbent on the members of a national group. He must learn its language and literature, interest himself in the upbuilding of its home, and seek to adjust its traditions and folkways and religious thought to the wants of his time. Only in this way can the Jew maintain and perpetuate the Jewish personality.

For years I've hoped that some enterprising editor would hire a hillbilly to go to the city and write his impressions of the quaint folkways of the cliff dwellers. I'd do it myself, cheap, and I've got a good questionnaire tucked away in readiness.

The restricted sustentive range of manipulations of foreign aid in economic warfare is especially marked. This is due to the state of the domestic law concerning foreign aid; "reciprocal controls" which a recipient state can exert; and a "folk way" expectation of economic aid flowing from centers of great productivity, such as the United States, the Soviet Union, and the countries of Western Europe. This folk-way expectation has emerged as a postulate of an obligation to supply the "needs of the needy" upon which foreign aid reasoning in both donor and recipient states tends to be founded.

It [a social institution] is a folkway, always new yet ever old, directive and responsive, a spur to and a check upon change, a creature of means and a master of ends.

At least since the time of Woodrow Wilson, studies of Congress have acknowledged the great importance of committee action in the legislative process. Stated in terms of legislative folkways, congressmen are expected to specialize in given subjects and then to rely on each other's specialized knowledge in areas that are not within their particular competence.

Francis Ford Coppola is not only engaged in making conceivable to the American audience the strange folkways of the Mafia, a process of translation of one signifying system into another. He is also using the difference of the Mafia to explore what the culture chooses to keep out of sight—the culture's preference for corporate values above individual/democratic and family values, and the Mafia's preference for family values not bound by the cash nexus but by blood, that is, values of the heart.