Word: abyss
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Kaplan both trace the history of naught, from its inception in Babylon around 300 B.C. through Athens, India and Europe later in the Middle Ages. It took Western mathematicians so long to accept zero because of their reluctance to treat nothing as something. Zero was equated with the abyss, the void, the unknown--all psychologically unpleasant subjects. No one wants to be a zero...
...Britain stood alone in June 1940. "Hitler knows that he will have to break us in this Island or lose the war. [I]f we fail, then the whole world, including the United States, including all that we have known and cared for, will sink into the abyss of a new Dark Age made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the light of perverted science. Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duties, and so bear ourselves that, if the British Empire and Commonwealth last for a thousand years, men will still say 'This was their finest hour.'" These...
...soon-to-be-graduating senior, the articulation of this pedantic ideal resonates with what I can only describe as a tragic timbre. As I explore that dark abyss known euphemistically as "The Real World," I cannot help but feel dangerously ill-prepared. Sure, ostensibly I have an ample cache of bankable practical skills--I can put together a mean PowerPoint presentation and can do basic arithmetic with the best of them. But when it comes to answering the really important questions--how to live and what to love--I'm afraid that my performance would fall in the bottom percentiles...
...speech delivered on Oct. 30 at the Kennedy School of Government, President Olusegun Obasanjo of Nigeria described the path that led to his country's descent into an abyss of mass poverty and political tyranny that were nurtured by a sequence of treacherous military dictatorships. The democratically elected ex-military dictator also outlined his government's reform plans to rebuild the nation's international image by fighting corruption, mandating equal rights for all 70-plus ethnic groups, affirmative action programs for women and, perhaps, do a tiny bit for the environment in the troubled Niger Delta region...
...awakened by a phone call early one morning in 1968, and a friend in the White House told me that Bobby had been shot. We plunged back into that abyss of mourning not only for a life lost and a family devastated again, but for a promise never fulfilled in our national life...