Word: tinkertoy
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...supported it, extended the strange and strained realm of suburbia. To absorb this mobility came drive-in theaters, drive-in restaurants, drive-in banks and, most important, the shopping mall--Main Street reconfigured for cars. Society was transfigured: the automobile brought America to a new frontier made up of Tinkertoy communities full of undefined relationships and spaces, with the car itself an extension of living room, playroom, bedroom, with the whole country viewed through the windshield...
Crick: The structure of DNA gives the game away, once you've seen it. A schoolboy can understand it. It's not something like relativity or quantum mechanics. It's a Tinkertoy, as somebody once said...
That was then and this is now. In the meantime, Challenger exploded, Hubble blurred, and the prospective space station ballooned to a Tinkertoy-looking assemblage bigger than a football field with a price tag of $38 billion, which would require 3,700 hours a year of dangerous spacewalking to maintain. Recently NASA scaled back the space station, shaving, it said, about $8 billion off the cost, but the General Accounting Office pegged the price of this new space station at $40 billion. The long-term cost, the GAO said, could amount to $118 billion, which puts the station...