Censorship is probably as old as language itself. Okay, maybe it’s not that old, but there were censorship laws in Ancient Greece and in Dynastic China more than 2,000 years ago. From the Latin verb censere meaning “to appraise, value or judge,” the word “censor” was first used to name the Roman official who oversaw public morals. How censorship is implemented, though, shifts over time. Today, …
If you had any doubt that 2010 was a complicated year, consider this: the five finalists for our People’s Choice Word of the Year were all fairly close contenders, and three of the words were multisyllabic mouthfuls. The top two entries were incredibly close – out of over 10,000 votes, the winner was only 40 votes ahead of the runner-up. The top five words, those …
If you find something that’s bigger than you thought was physically possible, how would you describe it? You start with what you already have, which is R136a1, the equivalent of a cosmic ZIP code. The R stands for Radcliffe Observatory, which located the star in the first place (long before anyone knew its immensity.) Massive isn’t the same thing as “big” in astronomy. Mass is …