Word: britishism
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Want to see how much the world has changed in the past decade? Log on to the Internet, launch a search engine and type in the word enquire (British spelling, please). You'll get about 30,000 hits. It turns out you can "enquire" about nearly anything online these days, from used Harley Davidsons for sale in Sydney, Australia ("Enquire about touring bikes. Click here!"), to computer-training-by-e-mail courses in India ("Where excellence is not an act but a habit"). Click once to go to a site in Nairobi and enquire about booking shuttle reservations there. Click...
...early 1900s engineers first appreciated how easily radio waves can be bounced off almost any object. In 1925 physicists took advantage of this, firing signals at the ionosphere and using the reflection to measure its altitude. By World War II, British scientists had refined the technology, and the government began to dot the coast of England with civil-defense radar stations. As the hardware got simpler, radar found its way into airplanes, boats and air-traffic-control towers, improving navigation and ensuring that even a cow-pasture airport could operate safely. By the end of the century, the same basic...
...British sociologist named Michael Young coined the word "meritocracy" to denote a society that organizes itself according to IQ-test scores. That term too has entered the language, though it doesn't have quite the market penetration that IQ does--or the disparaging overtone that Young intended in his satiric fable The Rise of the Meritocracy, 1870-2033. Terman and many other early advocates of IQ testing had in mind the creation of an American meritocracy, though the word didn't exist then. They believed IQ tests could be the means to create, for the first time ever, a society...
...British biochemist Frederick Hopkins postulates that "accessory food factors" are required for human health; these are now known as vitamins...
...British physicist Ernest Rutherford artificially splits an atom...