So I started thumbin' back east, toward my hometown.

Famous hotels, for instance, are astonishingly commonplace.

The last thing Lesotho needed was another poor harvest since so many vulnerable people are already living on the edge, struggling to cope with the combined impact of successive crop failures, extreme poverty and HIV/Aids, said Amir Abdulla, WFP's regional director for Southern Africa.

Hat-tippings and cap-doffings are of course of a different nature to more elaborate verbal greetings. In etiquette manuals they may be described as incentives to a conversation, but in practice they seem to have been quite ceremonial.