Word: scythian
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...folks to sell more alcohol, for others to drink more alcohol, and for still others to see if Anthrax really works as well as advertised. In fact, it's not even the year 2000. Our western calendar was concocted out of thin air by Dionysius Exiguus, a sixth-century Scythian monk, whose love of Jesus was eclipsed only by his inability to count accurately. Dionysius tried to estimate the date of his Savior's birth, and then tried to construct, on that foundation, a formal system of measuring time. Let's just say that mistakes were made...
...hard to think of an event more contrived than the millennium, unless one accepts that history unfolds in tidy hundred- and thousand-year cycles beginning with the birth of Jesus Christ. Or, to be more precise, his briss, which the inventor of the Anno Domini system of reckoning, a Scythian monk named Dennis the Diminutive, calculated--surely errantly--to have taken place on Jan. 1, A.D. 1. At any rate, the history of the past thousand years shows that mass psychology--if not events themselves--tends to behave in predictable ways when multiple zeros loom on the calendar...