Word: 1900s
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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This year's ball - first unveiled for the 2008 drop - is 12 feet in diameter (double the size of balls past) and weighs 11,875 pounds; it sparkles with 32,256 LED lights and 2,668 crystals. It's not the only thing that's gotten bigger since the 1900s; a crowd estimated at a million people will be celebrating in Times Square on Dec. 31, and millions more will be watching worldwide...
This gap in the English language shouldn't come as a surprise; the debate over what to name the first decade of this century has been going on since the middle decades of the last one. The 1900s never got a name beyond vague constructions like the turn of the century. One popular term--the aughts--has proved too archaic (and tricky to spell) to be broadly revived. 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...
...Life in the North wasn't always so rank-and-file. In the early 1900s, Pyongyang was widely known as the "Jerusalem of the East" for its vibrant milieu of Christians. American Protestant missionaries arrived as early as the 1880s (Catholics arrived centuries earlier but the religion didn't catch on as widely), building religious schools and universities across the capital. Later, as Christianity gained popularity, worshippers held group prayers in public every Christmas. But after the Japanese government took control of Korea in 1910, the new administration began suppressing religious gatherings, and by the 1950s, - after the Korean...
...continent's most famous exploration, however, remains the race to the South Pole in the early 1900s between British naval officer Robert Falcon Scott and Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen. Using 52 sled dogs and with four companions, Amundsen won the race - making it to the pole after a near two-month journey on Dec. 19, 1911. It took until nearly March for the team to reach Tasmania where they could send a telegram to let the rest of the world know of their feat. Scott later arrived on Jan. 17, 1912, just a month after Amundsen, but his entire team...
...that he has his facts wrong about the snows of Kilimanjaro. Yes, those immortal snows are vanishing (actually, they're glaciers, but we can blame Ernest Hemingway for that bit of poetic license), as Gore's global-warming documentary contends, but they've been receding since the early 1900s at least - long before the planet began to warm...