Word: happen
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...editorial for the New York Times, is pledged to "elevate hope over fear and tomorrow over yesterday." Rousing words, but who's to say that tomorrow is better than yesterday, those in Sri Lanka or Peru might say, and why should we put hope (based on what might happen) over fear (based on what has palpably happened)? It isn't self-evident that mankind is really progressing, at a level deeper than machines, any more than it is that any of us is wiser than our parents...
...with truth. Undaunted by the mundane at this august moment in the history of Western civilization is cnn legal analyst Greta Van Susteren. On the eve of the new millennium, she vows "to learn to comb my hair before my show rather than after." Medical and personal-grooming resolutions happen to be among my favorites. Here are two that I may or may not use this year, so feel free to borrow them if you'd like: "To actually mail in those occult fecal-blood tests that doctors always give you after checkups" and "to stop honking my rubber-bulb...
...photograph. The equations of general relativity simply can't handle such a situation, where the laws of cause and effect break down and particles jump from point A to point B without going through the space in between. In such a world, you can only calculate what will probably happen next--which is just what quantum theory is designed...
...come. "If I vote at all," social critic Lewis Mumford said, "it will be for the Communists." "The destruction of the Democratic Party," argued University of Chicago professor Paul Douglas (who would later become a pillar of the same party), "would be one of the best things that could happen in our political life." "The situation is critical," political analyst Walter Lippman warned Roosevelt two months before he took office. "You may have no alternative but to assume dictatorial power...
...example, the code of the Mesopotamian city of Eshnunna in the early second millennium B.C., developed a century before the more famous code of Hammurabi, left no doubt what would happen if you punched a man in the face: a fine of 10 shekels of silver (a bargain compared with the levy for biting off his nose, which would cost 60). As long as people could go about their business without fear of getting their noses bitten off, the social brain could productively throb...