Word: nostradamus
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks, public attention has turned once again to the cryptic prognosticatory quatrains of the sixteenth-century mystic Nostradamus. An e-mail that landed in many in boxes in the weeks after the attack quotes what it calls a prediction of the French astrologer’s: “In the City of God there will be a great thunder, / Two brothers torn apart by Chaos, while the fortress endures, the great leader will succumb, / The third big war will begin when the big city is burning...
...verse proved spurious (it seems to have been composed well before the attacks by a student trying to prove just how open to interpretation a Nostradamus-style quatrain really is) but that didn’t prevent it from gaining wide currency on the Internet...
Perhaps with this in mind, in the months since Sept. 11 public officials have made dire predictions with opacity reminiscent of Nostradamus. On Oct. 10 and again on Oct. 29, the Bush administration warned Americans that another terrorist attack was imminent. Officials urged alertness. There was no word, in either instance, of the nature of attack planned or of potential targets...
...terrorists had attacked after the Bush administration issued those ambiguous October warnings—no matter how they struck, or where—the administration would have been able to say it had foreseen the threat. As all interpreters of Nostradamus worth their salt know, the advantage of vague yet dire prophecy is that it may be interpreted to describe almost anything that occurs after the prophecy is issued...
...weeks following the attacks, several Web search engines noted that the word sex had dropped off the list of Top 10 search queries for the first time in memory. Among the hottest search terms on Google.com anthrax, counterstrike and Nostradamus...