Word: massing
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...they probably did. To be sure, quite soon after Diana's death, a school of thought argued that the raw hugs-and-tears emotionalism of her funeral was an embarrassing aberration, a fake sentiment tricked up by the mass media, keen for a good end-of-summer story. But that's not a line that convinces. The memories are too real for that, the significance of them too apparent...
...dinner in the far reaches of the Empire to keep up appearances in front of the natives. They stressed the benefits of order, hierarchy, muscular Protestantism and good sportsmanship. Even in its Victorian heyday, of course, not many in Britain behaved in this way. The world's first mass working class, shuffling from factories to boozy music halls, reveled in a raucous sentimentality. In the cities, Protestantism (or any religion), be it rugged or weedy, rarely got a look, and sportsmanship meant cheering on your local soccer team after downing a skinful of beer. But by the late 20th century...
...notable success: the rise of regulated athletic competition to take the place of blood sport as mass entertainment. In Rome at the height of its imperial glory, gladiators by the thousands fought to the death before cheering crowds. They hacked one another with swords; they were torn to pieces by wild animals. Most of them perished in near anonymity, but some became idols and sex symbols--men such as Celadus the Thracian, immortalized as "the young girls' heartthrob," and Crescens, "the netter of young girls by night...
Should you find your way up to Salem, Mass., this Halloween season, your chances of encountering a psychic are up - and the odds that that he or she has a felony record are down. That, for those of you who were too drowned in multimedia Harry Potter to notice, is the news from the real town where some estimate every tenth person is a witch...
...about half the number of people who could be expected to put their homes up for sale in a normal market. The most distressed neighborhoods are seeing foreclosure rates rivaling those produced during the state's oil and gas bust of the 1980s--except these days, there aren't mass layoffs to blame. Just flat house prices and tighter credit standards, which make it harder for homeowners to sell or refinance their way out of trouble...