Word: words
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...bland, but judging from my friends' status roundups, I am not alone. In fact, most Facebook users lead overwhelmingly boring lives. (They must; why else would they have nothing better to do than check Facebook?) My news feed is cluttered with updates about triple word scores in Scrabble, new Taco Bell menu items and people who won't stop talking about their pets. Sure, there is the occasional flash of excitement or wit - like in August, when I said that Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young sounded like the name of a law firm, or November when my friend Marc went...
Have you interviewed anyone who made you really nervous? - Barb Micetic Lancaster, Gridley, Ill. The worst interview I ever conducted was with TV host Steve Allen, who was having a bad day and decided that one-word answers should suffice. The interview felt like about a week and a half, and I think it took 20 minutes. (Read Walter Isaacson's tribute to Brian Williams in the TIME...
...WORD, TWO MEANINGS. MOMENT AS IN MOMENTARY, AN EVENT OR PASSION that is here, now, quick--then gone. Bush's last press conference, Madoff's comeuppance, a presidential puppy, Tiger's bad lie. Steroid scandals, swine-flu panics, airplane pilots good and bad. Already these fragments have the memorial feeling of snapshots in an old shoe box. But the other meaning is moment as in momentous, things that mattered in some lasting way, images destined not for shoe boxes but for history books. A year that dawned to the chime of change soon got bogged down in intractable troubles...
...Wordsmiths tried new coinages starting early: in 1963 a New Yorker writer suggested "Twenty oh-oh" for the far-off year 2000, a "nervous name for what is sure to be a nervous year." Twenty years later, a New York Times editorial proposed the Ohs. In 1989 the late word guru William Safire floated Zippy Zeros. (It sank.) In 1999 a New York City arts collective mounted a campaign to name the decade the naughties, plugging the moniker on posters and stickers around the city. Attempts to poll our way to consensus failed. One in 6 voters...
...That crowd never made it. Ripples of fear prompted a stampede after a concerted police charge. Tear gas and batons held the day once more. But word later came through that many had in fact reached Revolution Square and some had even gone to Tehran's iconic Freedom Monument...