Word: popularized
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...deeply nuanced campaign involving tactics as simple as knocking down walls--literally--in field offices of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms. Nonetheless, it has caused a tectonic change in how police around the country view gun crime. Now police routinely ask a basic question that, contrary to popular belief, they used to ask only rarely: Where did the bad guys get their guns...
...example of congressional road-blocking involves attempts to raise fuel-efficiency standards for popular sport-utility vehicles and vans, which have long had a free ride by being classified as light trucks. For the past four years, opponents have annually attached a rider to the Department of Transportation's budget prohibiting the DOT from raising the standards to equal those for ordinary cars--a move environmentalists say would save 1 million bbl. of oil a day. Backers of the rider argue that they are protecting auto-industry jobs and giving consumers the vehicles they want, but now they are running...
Time was when the dread moment of learning how popular you were came only with the delivery of birthday or Valentine's Day cards. Now every day is judgment day, thanks to instant messaging and the in-your-face presence of its address book (the "buddy list") on computer desktops. The software offers real-time chat with friends, family or co-workers who are online, as most now seem to be. Instant messaging, or IM, in fact, handles more missives each day than the U.S. Postal Service. Besides relying on it to evaluate their popularity levels, teenagers...
Which is why it's such a shame that Steve Case and Bill Gates aren't better buddies. The AOL and Microsoft bosses have spent the past week in a mini-war over this hugely popular software, which analysts consider the second most valuable piece of digital real estate in the world, after the Windows desktop. Because AOL is the undisputed king of IM, Microsoft (along with a host of other IM providers) is trying to gain access to the 40 million folks using AOL's free IM software--and is occasionally succeeding. AOL, claiming concern for users' password protection...
...hoppers, however, have no monopoly on sexual angst. TV has also become obsessed with virgins, from Felicity, Buffy and Dawson to next season's Popular and Wasteland. The medium loves titillating and moralizing, and virgin dramas allow both, a situation that has changed little since the 1978 controversy over NBC's James at 15. Dan Wakefield, who created James, says NBC then balked not at James' deflowering but at his using birth control: "They said that if James has sex at age 16 and is not married, he must suffer and be punished." Just so, Buffy can lose her maidenhead...