Word: britishism
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Smithsonian's National Museum of American History has opened a permanent show on America's fascination with time. In bookstores, best-selling author James Gleick's Faster (Pantheon), which laments the accelerating pace of our lives, will be joined next month by The End of Time (Oxford University Press), British physicist Julian Barbour's treatise on the idea that time doesn't even exist. It's nothing more, he says, than an illusion, a sort of cosmic parlor trick...
...illusion that has appeared in very different guises to different groups. Says Greenwich observatory director Kristen Lippencott, who put together the British exhibition: "Time is not the thing on our wrists. Time is a cultural object." For many outside the Western European tradition, for instance, time is a circle that turns on a daily, yearly and even a cosmic scale. The Hindu concept of reincarnation is perhaps the most familiar example, but the Hopi in the American Southwest and the Inuit in the Arctic also look at the world as a series of repeating cycles with no beginning...
Technology also demands that time be measured ever more precisely. An accurate mechanical clock proved to be so valuable to the British maritime industry in the eighteenth century that the government awarded a hefty prize to its inventor, Joseph Harrison (a story elegantly told in Dava Sobel's 1995 best seller Longitude...
...Thompson's brand of biological determinism sets off alarms for many. "The idea that you're simply born bad is an evil misconception," says Peter Fonagy, director of the Child and Family Center at the Menninger Clinic, who has done a review of conduct-disorder studies for the British government. "We have to look at intervening early and how that can help change antisocials...
...Erotic Personalities of the Millennium chosen by readers of the British Erotic Review: No. 1, Marilyn Monroe; No. 4, Margaret Thatcher...