Word: offing
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Sometimes it flies, sometimes it crawls, but it always passes inexorably. We mark it, save it, waste it, bide it, race against it. We measure it incessantly, with a passion for precision that borders on the obsessive. Time is so vitally enmeshed with the fabric of our existence, in fact...
Indeed, while scientists have harnessed the power of the atom, cracked the genetic code and probed the very edges of the universe, they still don't understand time much better than St. Augustine did. Yet now, as the last few days of the second millennium tick rapidly away (though diehard...
If so, it's an illusion that has appeared in very different guises to different groups. Says Greenwich observatory director Kristen Lippencott, who put together the British exhibition: "Time is not the thing on our wrists. Time is a cultural object." For many outside the Western European tradition, for instance...
In the Judeo-Christian West, however, time is a line, marching steadily from the past to the future. As Lippencott puts it, "God never moves backward." Deward Walker, an anthropologist at the University of Colorado, Boulder, argues that this way of viewing time is "part of the reason we have...
Technology, in turn, has led to our obsession with ultraprecise timekeeping and time management. Before the Industrial Revolution, the exact time of day or year mattered only to those in specialized jobs, such as astrologers and sailors. For the rest, the day began at dawn, noon was when the sun...