Word: last
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Even 5-year-olds know that when counting anything - toes, fingers or years - we begin with one, not zero. The first decade of this millennium began with the year 2001, and the last year of the first decade of this millennium will be next year, 2010. The millennium began with the year 2001. Why is this so difficult for adults to grasp? Anna Link Falls Church...
...wept uncontrollably at Mr. Serwer's lament about the U.S.'s dismal decade. The hopeful last paragraph raised my spirits, however, knowing that with so many trump cards on its side, the home of the brave and the land of the free will rise again to plunder the planet for generations to come. Robert Leckie Mount Helena, Australia...
...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...
Former frump SUSAN BOYLE gets last laugh: her album is most preordered in Amazon.com history...
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...