Word: finning
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When the expression fin de siecle first appeared in France roughly 100 years ago, it meant modern and up-to-date, but it quickly acquired a very negative connotation, and people spoke of a sickness -- la maladie de fin de siecle. The term was applied to anything thought to be corrupt, febrile, degenerate...
...optimistic, progress-obsessed U.S., the fin de siecle had a different tone and temper. The new century seemed to be the new frontier, and predictions about what it would bring were rampant. Many were accurate, from airplanes to television to freeways to disposable bottles. There were some howlers as well, including the forecast that autos would make streets as quiet as country lanes, that there would be no trees left in America by 1920, and that by the end of the 20th century, blacks would constitute about two-thirds of the U.S. population...
...prophet could anticipate what actually did happen. So here we are, an incredible, terrible, marvelous century later, nearing our own fin de siecle -- and fin de millennium...
...prophets of doom from the previous fin de siecle would also find much to welcome. Murky but menacing predictions by Nostradamus are widely quoted. Survivalists are digging caves. Evangelical sects are getting ready for famine, flood, comets and war to accompany the End of the Days, as outlined in the books of Daniel and Revelation...
Whether pessimists or optimists, we are once again awed by the fin-de-siecle frisson. As Barbara Tuchman put it, people feel "as if the hand of God were turning a page in human fate." We have a sense of things ending and others beginning...