Word: zeitgeist
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Another adds, "I will have no choice." And another warns that she will soon be faced with a choice between "my job and my faith." The ads prompted hundreds of thousands of views on Youtube.com, but they mainly served to show how far removed their creators were from the zeitgeist. The Colbert Report mocked the ads, and countless parodies have sprung up across the Internet at the expense of the ads' grave-faced actors...
Nevertheless, they seem to be telling us something about the zeitgeist. Once you start looking, you see them everywhere. Who hasn't had a high school acquaintance come back from the dead as a Facebook friend or a follower on Twitter? And what monster could be better suited to our current level of ecological anxiety? Zombies are biodegradable, locally sourced and sustainable - they're made of 100% recycled human. And look out for those zombie banks, President Obama...
...There are also more puckish signs of a zeitgeist shift. A few weeks ago, the White House decided to stage a forum in which the President would answer questions submitted by the public; 92,000 people responded - and most of them seemed obsessed with the legalization of marijuana. The two most popular questions about "green jobs and energy," for example, were about pot. The President dismissed the outpouring - appropriately, I guess - as online ballot-stuffing and dismissed the legalization question with a simple: "No." (Read "Can Marijuana Help Rescue California's Economy...
...same zeitgeist made gambling ubiquitous: until the late '80s, only Nevada and New Jersey had casinos, but now 12 states do, and 48 have some form of legalized betting. It's as if we decided that Mardi Gras and Christmas are so much fun, we ought to make them a year-round way of life. And we started living large literally as well as figuratively. From the beginning to the end of the long boom, the size of the average new house increased by about half. Meanwhile, the average American gained about a pound a year, so that an adult...
...will more likely be a force for civility - for "boring" things like good governance, for new ideas about how to control the cost of entitlements (which Obama pointedly mentioned in his speech) - rather than a rabble spamming the offices of recalcitrant Republicans. It will fit neatly into the Obama zeitgeist...