Word: ago
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Most of this numbering is useful, and a good deal of it is indispensable. In any event, the world could hardly have wound up otherwise. Human beings began counting and "falling under the spell of numbers," in H.G. Wells' words, well before they could write. Long ago, the entire species was like some modern aboriginal peoples (the Damara and some Hottentots in Africa, for example) who possess words only for numbers up to three, every larger quantity being simply expressed as "many." A fascination with the multiplicity of things, together with a quenchless scientific yen, pushed the main body...
...amount of a billion: the 125-mile-high stack of dollar bills that would add up to about a billion, the airplane propeller turning around the clock at 2,400 r.p.m. that would fall short of spinning a billion times in a year, the fact that a billion minutes ago (A.D. 77) the Christian era had scarcely got under way. Still, such efforts to evoke the actuality of a billion are far likelier to give the curious a picture of an extremely tall stack of currency than of the quantity of a billion units. In truth, most mega-numbers...
...passengers on the Cambridge bus to the Women Against Pornography (WAP) march on Times Square a week ago got a pretty good idea of what they were up against the minute they boarded. A day-glo poster above the driver's seat read, "Don't ask me to think--I was hired for my looks." Tall, blond, and paunchy, wearing his name (Dick) on a big pewter belt buckle, the man beneath the sign greeted the "ladies" as the coach pulled onto the Mass Pike. "A couple of you look familiar back there," he said. "I didn...
...demonstration on October 20, the first large-scale feminist protest on the issue of pornography in ten years, took a lot of people by surprise. Conceived of two months ago by an organization which has only existed three times that long, the demonstration brought to the foreground an area of women's rights which has seldom been confronted by the women's movement and often swept under the rug by other progressive groups. Pornography--a multibillion dollar underground industry with organized crime and international connections, which WAP claims eroticizes male humiliation of and violence towards women in the name...
Representatives of the organization state its purpose carefully and often. During a slide show about pornography, at the Harvard Science Center three weeks ago, Wendy Kaminer of WAP said, "We're not against erotica. We're against violence against women masquerading as entertainment...