Word: began
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...that conspicuous, late-second-millennium phenomenon: runaway hype. We've seen years of countdowns, retrospectives and magazine special issues. One entrepreneur went as far as to trademark and license the date 01-01-00 for New Year's gewgaws. No sooner did the milestone begin looming than advertisers began trying to persuade us to, say, associate the Roman numeral 2000--MM--with a certain candy-coated chocolate. Even the Y2K problem has morphed from potential cataclysm to commercial punch line: a Nike ad shows a man going for a jog New Year's morning as the lights flicker out around...
During the last decade of his life, Henry David Thoreau (1817-62) began a systematic survey of the Massachusetts vegetation surrounding Concord, where he lived in the third-floor attic of his parents' house. His mission, as he told his journal, was "to find God in nature," the Transcendental imperative he absorbed from his mentor Ralph Waldo Emerson. True, the 26 months Thoreau had spent living alone in a cabin by Walden Pond, memorialized in Walden (1854), involved a similar quest for some "trace of the Ineffable," but now he wanted to remove himself from the center of his observations...
...money and every year leaving behind a prodigious pile of ious. As recently as 1992, the government spent a record $290 billion more than it took in, and the deficit would have been much larger without a big Social Security surplus. That was before the 1997 budget deal that began winding down the deficit, however. Now the payoff is here. In the fiscal year just ended, Uncle Sam rolled up a $123 billion surplus, by far the biggest in the nation's history. Even the non-Social Security part of the government about broke even. Suddenly, Capitol Hill is expecting...
...Public safety did what they normally do," Pitoniak said. "They put out a public safety alert and began their investigation...
...Thursday, the hard part - the Army I signed up for - began. As we sat on the bus waiting to leave Reception Camp for Basic Training, our heads down so we wouldn't be able to find our way back, a drill sergeant popped his head in to say a hearty good-bye. "Y'all can make it," he said. "But y'all gonna get scuffed...