Word: sprang
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...that chapter, Gould retraces the history of malfunctioning Christian calendars back to a monk named Dionysius Exigus who began the A.D. calendar at the year 1 rather than the year zero. From there sprang the simmering academic debate over whether the new millennium begins on Jan. 1, 2000, or one year later. Based on extensive research of fin de siecle newspapers and magazines, Gould observes that pop culture has generally favored the 1999 New Year's Day as the dawning of the new century. The other view "has always been over-whelmingly favored by scholars and by people in power...
...over to police, and on March 28, 1979, at 9 a.m., homicide detective Chitwood knocked on Einhorn's door. Once inside, he headed straight for the locked closet. He pried it open with a crowbar and immediately smelled a "faint decaying smell, like a dead animal." Next he sprang the lock on the steamer trunk. The newspapers inside were dated August and September 1977. Under them was Styrofoam packing material. Chitwood scooped through it until he came to something he couldn't identify at first, and then it was clear. A hand. A human hand. He scooped some more...
...area resembles not so much a city as a computer motherboard or a printed circuit. As Thomas Pynchon describes it through the eyes of Oedipa Maas in The Crying of Lot 49, "The ordered swirl of houses and streets, from this high angle, sprang at her now with the same unexpected, astonishing clarity as the circuit card had. Though she knew even less about radios than about Southern Californians, there were to both outward patterns a hieroglyphic sense of concealed meaning, of an intent to communicate...
Plainness ran deeper than taste. It sometimes grew out of religious conviction--formal severity was built into the Puritan creed, for instance. But it also sprang from the social necessities of American life: the need to make and mend things for oneself, to fit and adapt to local materials. And it acquired a political dimension as metaphor...
...serving youth. The Orthodox have always had an extensive system of Yeshiva day schools; Reform and Conservative are expanding their smaller networks. Sprinkled around the country are high schools sponsored by members of all three branches. It is intriguing to imagine what would happen if more sprang up: instead of saddening her parents by arriving at Seder with a nice Catholic boy (like her older sister's husband), a Reform Jewish girl could thrill them with the fine Conservative lad she met in, say, biology lab. Three guesses as to the faith of their kids...