Word: british english
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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...
Scott Westerfeld, whose Uglies novels are huge best sellers, chose a steampunk setting for his new young-adult series. Leviathan, published in October, tells the story of two teenagers--an Austrian prince and an English girl passing as a boy--in a Europe divided between the Austro-Hungarian Clankers, who are technologists, and the British Darwinists, who are bioengineers. "Leviathan takes place as World War I begins, which is the end of the early era of technological romance," Westerfeld explains. "Those first tanks and other machines of war look almost comical to us now, but to the first soldiers...
Burt, a poetry writer and scholar by profession, has taught such English department staples as “Modern American Poetry” and “Major British Writers II” since arriving at the university in 2007. But he is also a longtime student of science fiction. Once a childhood reader of Robert Silverberg, Ursula K. Le Guin, and Isaac Asimov, he now writes course syllabi and critical articles on the genre...
...legacy? Bicentennial celebrations have portrayed Darwin as a kindly old gentleman pottering around an English house and garden. What that misses is the way his ideas were abused in the 20th century and the way in which Darwin was wrong about certain key issues. He asserted that different races of mankind had traveled different distances along the evolutionary path - white Caucasians were at the top of the racial hierarchy, while black and brown people ranked below. [Racism] was a widespread prejudice in British society at the time, but he presented racial hierarchy as a matter of science. He also held...
Archie Jones is the English everyman: a bit dithering, culturally ignorant, but fiercely loyal in a pinch. Jones lives in an England haunted by the Second World War and the disintegration of the British Empire, one reeling from the influx of brown-skinned people with gleaming white teeth. He takes it all in his distinctly English way, his big eyes and open countenance accepting without understanding: “He liked people to get on with things, Archie. He kind of felt people should just live together, you know, in peace or harmony or something...