Word: warp
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...signs of what Germans call Waldsterben, or dying forests, are obvious. New leaves and needles, smaller than usual, turn yellow or brown and finally drop to the ground. In time, many evergreens, some of them 150 years old, simply stop bearing needles. Roots and trunks begin to warp, gnarl and shrink...
...been maintained by the controlled use of fear. The horror of nuclear war has greatly troubled every President, and yet all of them since 1945 have conditioned themselves to plan nuclear strategy coolly and prudently. The experts tend to agree that too much fear in the Oval Office would warp judgments and make crises more likely...
...national crime rate began dropping two years ago, and last year it fell by 3% from the previous year. In many sections of the country there has been an even sharper decline over the past two years. One possible explanation for the overcrowded cells, criminologists say, is a time warp in the criminal careers of the baby-boom generation: only in the past few years have the criminal records of offenders born in the decade after World War II grown long enough to warrant prison terms...
...seemingly interminable history of the Viet Nam War. Compared with the 100 million people who watched the imaginary bombing of Lawrence, Kans., only a minuscule number watched the real bombing of Cambodia. The press, which devoted large headlines to The Day After, lost Cambodia in a kind of time warp. Since TV shows get covered when they start, the Viet Nam series had been widely reviewed two months before-old news by now. Although...
...science was then, at least in some areas, in a similar state. Learned astronomers argued vociferously over whether our galaxy, the Milky Way, was alone or only one of many islands of stars. In medicine, the first sulfa drugs were unheard of. Physicists, having recently discovered that gravity could warp space and time, were now catching glimpses of an even wilder idea: that at its fundamental level, of atomic particles, the universe was governed entirely by chance. There was not a hint of the powerful forces these ideas would eventually unleash...