Wordorigins.org

The Oxford English Dictionary has 12 words with first citations from 2000. In that year, the outcome of the U. S. presidential election is disputed due to an excruciatingly close vote count in Florida, with the U. S. Supreme Court stopping the recount and effectively awarding the election to George W. Bush; America Online purchases Time-Warner for $162 billion, the largest corporate merger in history; the dotcom bubble bursts; the death of Charles Schulz ends the forty-nine-year run of the Peanuts comic strip; the Human Genome Project releases its “rough draft” of the human genetic code; Sony releases the Playstation 2 game console, the best-selling gaming platform to date; the U. S. government wins its case against Microsoft with a court ruling that the firm engaged in monopolistic and anti-competitive practices; the International Space Station begins to be continuously occupied; and India’s population tops one billion people.

The Oxford English Dictionary has 20 words with first citations from 1999. In that year, the Euro begins to be used as currency; the Dow Jones Industrial Average closes above 10,000 for the first time; the war in Kosovo ends with Serbian capitulation to NATO forces; the U. S. Senate acquits President Clinton in his impeachment trial; the trend of shootings at U. S. schools comes to Columbine High School in Colorado; Lance Armstrong wins his first Tour de France; the television series The Sopranos debuts on HBO; Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace is released to the disappointment of millions of once-eager fans; and world population hits the six billion mark.

The Oxford English Dictionary has 16 words with first citations from 1998. In that year, Suharto resigns the presidency of Indonesia after thirty-two years in office; India and Pakistan conduct a series of nuclear weapons tests; the Second Congo War begins, which will to go on to become the bloodiest since World War II; Hugo Chavez is elected president of Venezuela; U. S. Senator John Glenn returns to space aboard the space shuttle Discovery, at seventy-seven the oldest person to go into orbit; the game show The Price is Right airs its five thousandth episode; and singer Frank Sinatra dies.

The Oxford English Dictionary has 32 words with first citations from 1997. In that year, Tony Blair becomes prime minister of the U. K., ending eighteen years of Conservative Party rule; Madeleine Albright becomes the first woman U. S. secretary of state; with the closest approach to earth of comet Hale-Bopp, thirty-nine members of the Heaven’s Gate cult commits mass suicide in San Diego, California; at age fourteen, Tara Lipinski becomes the youngest world figure skating champion in history; J. K. Rowling publishes the first Harry Potter book; James Cameron’s film Titanic is released, going on to smash all previous box office records and become the first film to gross over one billion dollars; the TV series Buffy the Vampire Slayer makes its debut; the Mayo Clinic warns that the diet drug fen-phen can cause severe heart and lung damage; Steve Jobs returns to Apple Computer to rescue the failing company; Jeanne Calment, the oldest person on record, dies at age 122 years, 164 days in Arles, France; and Diana, Princess of Wales dies in an automobile accident in Paris.

The Oxford English Dictionary has 48 words with first citations from 1996. In that year, Theodore Kaczynski, the “Unabomber,” is arrested in a Montana cabin; Primary Colors, a scathing fictionalized account of the 1992 Democratic presidential primary by “Anonymous” (later revealed to be journalist Joe Klein) becomes a political sensation; Alanis Morissette redefines irony and wins the Grammy award for album of the year for her Jagged Little Pill; the computer Deep Blue defeats world champion Garry Kasparov at chess for the first time; Dolly, a sheep, is the first mammal successfully cloned from an adult cell; and in Romer v. Evans the U. S. Supreme Court rules that anti-sodomy laws are unconstitutional.

The Oxford English Dictionary has 50 words with first citations from 1995. In that year, the World Trade Organization (WTO) was established; Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols bombed the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, killing 168; the Dow Jones Industrial Average closed above 5,000 for the first time; securities broker Nick Leeson caused the collapse of Barings Bank through illegal and high-risk speculation; the cult Aum Shinrikyo released Sarin nerve agent in the Tokyo subway, killing 13 and injuring over 5,000; computer hacker Kevin Mitnick was arrested by the FBI; O. J. Simpson was acquitted of murder charges; and Pixar released Toy Story, the first all-CG feature-length film.

This article doesn’t provide any new information, and frustratingly doesn’t link to any actual studies, only journalistic accounts of the studies, but it is a nice summary of the state of our knowledge of animal language and whether or not it exists.

I do note the one claim about dogs being as smart as a two or three-year-old human child. The way they are measuring intelligence s remarkably anthropocentric. It’s like the old saying that the remarkable thing about a dancing bear is not how well he dances, but that he dances at all. Dogs are that smart because they demonstrate equivalent linguistic capabilities. And in fact, dogs that are trained to respond to human voices, like border collies, score higher on the “intelligence” scale. Well, duh. Rough comparisons of “intelligence” between species are meaningless. We can measure narrow aspects of intelligence, and such measurements are interesting and useful, but since we don’t have any consensus on what intelligence is in its entirety, broad comparisons like this are quite silly.

(Tip o’ the Hat to Andrew Sullivan)

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The Oxford English Dictionary has 62 words with first citations from 1994. In that year, Nelson Mandela is elected president of South Africa; investigators begin to look into the U. S. President Clinton’s involvement in the Whitewater development project; Russia sends troops into Chechnya; Olympic skater Tonya Harding tries to have rival Nancy Kerrigan kneecapped; Kurt Cobain, frontman of the grunge band Nirvana, commits suicide; comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 strikes Jupiter; the Netscape Navigator web browser is released; Lorena Bobbitt is found not guilty by reason of insanity of mutilating her husband’s genitals; and former American football star O. J. Simpson is arrested for the murder of his ex-wife, Nicole Brown Simpson, and Ronald Goldman.

A southpaw is a left-hander or the left hand. Today, the word is primarily used in baseball, but appears in other contexts as well. But despite its use in baseball, the term almost certainly did not originate with that sport. Use of southpaw to mean the left hand goes back all the way to 1813, long before baseball, as we know it today, existed. It’s used in a letter appearing in the Philadelphia newspaper The Tickler on 30 June of that year:

“Luk here mon, and convince yourself,” said he, holding up the Tickler, in the right paw, between the ceiling and the floor, and with the south paw pointing to the “bow, vow, vow.”

The south is most likely simply a reference to the opposite orientation than is usual and the paw is self-explanatory.

The Oxford English Dictionary has 99 words with first citations from 1993. In that year, Islamic terrorists bomb the World Trade Center, killing six and injuring over a thousand; the Chemical Weapons Convention is signed, outlawing those weapons worldwide; E. Annie Proulx’s book The Shipping News is published; director Stephen Spielberg has two of the four top-grossing films of the year, Jurassic Park and Schindler’s List; mathematician Andrew Wiles publishes his proof of Fermat’s Last Theorem; astronauts conduct a repair mission to correct the lens of the Hubble Space Telescope; and Intel ships the first Pentium microprocessors.