Word: dust
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...mounting that the dinosaurs went out with a bang. According to the much debated theory proposed by the father-son team Luis and Walter Alvarez in 1980, an asteroid or comet slammed into the earth at the end of the Cretaceous period, 65 million years ago, spewing so much dust into the atmosphere that sunlight was blocked for months. Temperatures plummeted, plants withered, and many species, including the mighty dinosaurs, perished en masse...
...have generated an enormous 3,000 degrees F fireball that would have spread outward at the speed of sound, igniting forest fires from North America to Asia. Several hundred billion tons of plants and animals would have been incinerated, sending great scarves of black smoke to join the impact dust in the stratosphere and circulate around the globe. What is more, because soot does not rain out as easily as dust, the protonuclear winter would have lasted much longer than it would through obscuring dust alone. Most plants and large animals that survived the blast, the fire and the lethal...
...during the early 1970s that Times Beach, looking to keep down the summer dust, hired a fellow to spread oil on ten miles of unpaved streets. Unfortunately, the oilman also filled his truck with waste sludge from a downstate chemical factory, and so for at least a couple of summers, he sprayed tens of thousands of gallons of a dioxin-laced goo all over town. The agent of the town's destruction was a man named Russell Bliss. "Do I blame Bliss?" asks Joe Capstick, who lived in Times Beach 14 years and, after the town's demise, moved down...
Once in a while a band comes along that is so mushy, so nebulous, so irrelevant that not even the slickest packaging by Dolby's studio team can reclaim it from the vinyl dust...
Writers, etymologists and other devotees of verbal arcana have never been given a richer browsing ground. But while they are discovering that a blind tiger is a place to buy and drink moonshine, or that there are 176 names for dust balls under the bed, they are also bound to be awed by the dictionary's staggering scholarship. Virtually every entry is meticulously catalogued for its geographic roots, first recorded usage, evolution of meaning and the most subtle shading of sound. Pronunciation Editor James Hartman particularly prizes manniporchia, a northern Maryland word for the DTs. The dictionary's investigators traced...