Word: babel
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...tell us that the central division in our transnational world is between the "slow" cultures of the plow and the "fast" ones of the microchip, the gap between them accelerating at an unprecedented rate. But what is more of a vexation in our modern times--a temporal Tower of Babel, as you could call it--is that everything's mixed up: fast and slow are present in every country, often, and in every household. Ancient cultures, as in India and China, are eager to invite the future to come to stay, so long as it doesn't interfere with...
Europe entered the century as a study in disintegrated empire. Rome had long since fallen. Charlemagne had briefly laid claim to its authority, but his heirs could not sustain a continent-wide order. Christendom was a Babel of weak and squabbling kings, aristocrats whose holdings sometimes exceeded those of royalty, and a church that would spawn two competing Popes...
Since the war's start, allied unity has been more important than lethality. Unless NATO reaches a credible consensus to gather a serious invasion force, the Tower of Babel talk won't do much to move Milosevic. Threatening to dispatch troops at the start might have given him pause, or at least forced some of his soldiers to stay home and protect Serbian borders instead of depopulating Kosovo. Had a relatively small ground force been deployed by now, it could have made the air war more lethal by spotting targets and flushing Serbian armor from hiding. But now the noisy...
...travel to distant lands trying to escape their mothers, only to discover--surprise!--that their lives are more similar to their mother's than they thought. Davidson also attempts to weave cooking, Greek mythology and sexual awakening into her alinear story, which ultimately tumbles like the Tower of Babel under its heavy pedanticness. Davidson, a poet, should not quit her day job. Although the language of The Priest Fainted is eloquent enough, the alinearity simply gets tire-some, as do her pathetic attempts to compare herself--the reader can safely presume that the 19-year old narrator is a version...
...road to Rome remains steep," he said, calling his efforts to incorporate the legal systems of myriad countries in a new world court "a procedural Tower of Babel...