Today in History (May 1st):
1769: Birthdays: Arthur Wellesley, the first duke of Wellington.
1786: Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s opera The Marriage of Figaro was first performed.
1851: The Great Exhibition opened in London.
1852: Birthdays: Sharpshooter Calamity Jane, real name Martha Jane Cannary Burke.
1884: Construction began on the world’s first skyscraper — the 10-story Home Insurance Company building in Chicago.
1893: U.S. President Grover Cleveland opened the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago.
1896: Birthdays: U.S. Army Gen. Mark Clark.
1898: During the Spanish-American war, U.S. Navy Adm. George Dewey routed the Spanish fleet in the Philippines.
1907: Birthdays: Singer Kate Smith.
1913: Birthdays: Actor Louis Nye.
1916: Birthdays: Actor Glenn Ford.
1918: Birthdays: Television personality Jack Paar.
1919: Birthdays: Actor Dan O’Herlihy.
1923: Birthdays: Author Joseph Heller.
1924: Birthdays: Game show host Art Fleming.
1925: Birthdays: Mercury astronaut Scott Carpenter.
1929: Birthdays: Singer Sonny James.
1931: The Empire State Building was dedicated in New York City. It remained the world’s tallest building for 40 years.
1939: Birthdays: Singer Judy Collins.
1945: Birthdays: Singer Rita Coolidge.
1946: Birthdays: Hong Kong film director John Woo.
1960: The Soviet Union shot down an American U-2 spy plane flown by Francis Gary Powers, who was captured. Birthdays: Jockey Steve Cauthen.
1967: Birthdays: Singer Tim McGraw.
1971: Amtrak, the national passenger rail service that combined the operations of 18 passenger railroads, went into service.
1991: A record-setting day in baseball: Rickey Henderson of the Oakland Athletics stole his 939th base, making him the all-time leader; Nolan Ryan of the Texas Rangers pitched his record seventh no-hitter.
1992: U.S. President George H.W. Bush ordered 4,000 military troops into the riot-ravaged streets of Los Angeles.
1993: Sri Lankan President Ranasinghe Premadasa and others in his entourage were killed in a suicide bomb blast.
1997: 18 years of Conservative Party rule in Great Britain ended with a Labor Party victory in elections, which allowed party leader Tony Blair to succeed John Majors as prime minister.
1999: Charismatic, a 31-1 long shot, won the 125th Kentucky Derby in Louisville. It was the third highest payoff in Derby history.
2001: A former member of the Ku Klux Klan was convicted in Birmingham, Ala., in a 1963 church bombing that killed four black girls. He was given four life sentences.
2003: U.S. President George W. Bush, speaking from the aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln, declared that major combat in Iraq was over and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld announced the end of major U.S. combat operations in Afghanistan.
2004: The European Union added 10 member countries, including Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic, running the total to 25.
2005: Five men in Madain, Iraq, confessed to the kidnapping and slaying of British aid worker Margaret Hassan, who was abducted in October.
2008: The U.S. Congress gave final approval to a bill making it illegal for employers and insurance companies to discriminate on the basis of genetic history. It became law May 24.
2009: U.S. Supreme Court Justice David Souter announced he would retire from the high court at the end of the current term in June. He was on the court 19 years. U.S. government figures showed economic output fell 6.1 percent during the first three months of 2009 and unemployment reached 8.9 percent in April.
2010: Thousands of tourists and theatergoers were evacuated from New York’s Times Square area for more than 8 hours so police could disarm a malfunctioned bomb found in an SUV, parked, its motor running, smoke coming from rear vents. Storms and flooding led to a reported 21 deaths in Tennessee where record rainfall totaled almost 14 inches over two days. The stormy weather also claimed lives in Mississippi and Kentucky.
2011: Osama bin Laden, architect of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attack on the United States, founder of al-Qaida and the face of global terrorism, was killed in a U.S. midnight commando raid on his compound hideout near the Pakistani capital.
2012: U.S. President Barack Obama, speaking from Afghanistan in a televised address to Americans, said Afghans will be fully responsible for their security by 2014.
Quotes
“Satire is a sort of glass, wherein beholders do generally discover everybody’s face but their own, which is the chief reason for that kind of reception it meets in the world, and that so very few are offended with it.” – Jonathan Swift, satirist (1667-1745)
“Spoon feeding in the long run teaches us nothing but the shape of the spoon.” – E.M. Forster
“No man should judge unless he asks himself in absolute honesty whether in a similar situation he might not have done the same.” – Viktor Frankl, author, neurologist and psychiatrist, Holocaust survivor (1905-1997)
“Talking of successful rackets
modesty deserves a mention.
Exclamation marks in brackets
never fail to draw attention.”
– Piet Hein, poet and scientist (1905-1996)
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Golda Meir (1898-1978) Israeli political leader:
“A leader who doesn’t hesitate before he sends his nation into battle is not fit to be a leader.”
“Ability hits the mark where presumption overshoots and diffidence falls short.”
“Above all, this country is our own. Nobody has to get up in the morning and worry what his neighbors think of him. Being a Jew is no problem here.”
“Arab sovereignty in Jerusalem just cannot be. This city will not be divided-not half and half, not 60-40, not 75-25, nothing.”
“As President Nixon says, presidents can do almost anything, and President Nixon has done many things that nobody would have thought of doing.”
“Authority poisons everybody who takes authority on himself.”
“Being seventy is not a sin.”
“Don’t be humble… you’re not that great.”
“Fashion is an imposition, a reign on freedom.”
“Glorious bouquets and storms of applause are the trimmings which every artist naturally enjoys.”
“I can honestly say that I was never affected by the question of the success of an undertaking. If I felt it was the right thing to do, I was for it regardless of the possible outcome.”
sacrilegious
PRONUNCIATION: (sak-ri-LIJ-uhs)
MEANING: (adjective), Violating what is considered sacred.
ETYMOLOGY: From Middle English, from Old French, from Latin sacrilegium, from sacrilegus (one who steals sacred thing), from scar, from sacer (sacred) + -legere (to gather, steal).
USAGE: “After enjoying his regular morning donut, newly promoted supervisor Mervyn decided to have another, a heretofore sacrilegious activity which elicited gasps from everyone in the vicinity.”
mammonism
PRONUNCIATION: (MAM-uh-niz-uhm)
http://wordsmith.org/words/mammonism.mp3
MEANING: (noun), The greedy pursuit of riches.
ETYMOLOGY: Via Latin and Greek, from Aramaic mamona (riches). Mammon was personified as a false god in the New Testament. Earliest documented use: 1843.
USAGE: “The IOC is just another rapacious, money-making corporation like any other but it conceals all this behind the smokescreen of ‘Olympian’ values and sporting heroism. It’s worse than any investment bank for mammonism and is seemingly oblivious to the supreme irony of the world’s foremost sporting spectacle being sponsored by McDonald’s and Coke.” – Heroic Ideals; Euroweek (London, UK); Jul 27, 2012.
Jonah
PRONUNCIATION: (JOH-nuh)
http://wordsmith.org/words/jonah.mp3
MEANING: (noun), One believed to bring bad luck.
ETYMOLOGY: After Jonah, a prophet in the Old Testament, whose presence on a ship was believed to bring a storm. He was thrown overboard and swallowed by a fish or a whale and returned three days later. From Latin Jonas, Greek Ionas, from Hebrew yonah (dove). Earliest documented use: 1612.
USAGE: “Chairman Ned Sullivan is a Jonah of the corporate world. Ned is a chairman of the currently disastrous McInerney Properties. McInerney shares have collapsed from €2.50 twelve months ago to today’s price of 57¢. – Shane Ross; Ghosts Haunt Greencore; The Sunday Independent (Dublin, Ireland); Jun 29, 2008.
Explore “jonah” in the Visual Thesaurus.
http://visualthesaurus.com/?w1=jonah
tartar
PRONUNCIATION: (TAHR-tuhr)
http://wordsmith.org/words/tartar.mp3
MEANING: (noun)
1. A fierce, uncontrollable person.
2. One who proves to be unexpectedly formidable. Usually used in the idiom “to catch a tartar”.
3. A hard yellowish deposit that forms on the teeth.
4. A reddish deposit on the sides of wine casks.
ETYMOLOGY:
For 1, 2: A Tartar, more commonly called a Tatar, was a member of Mongolian and Turkish tribes who under the leadership of Genghis Khan ransacked much of Asia and Eastern Europe in the early 13th century. Earliest documented use: around 1386.
For 3, 4: From Latin tartarum, from Greek tartaron. Earliest documented use: around 1386.
USAGE:
“My mother was an amazingly gentle and cheerful person, but on racism she was a tartar and an Amazon.” – Derek Cohen; Apartheid at the Edges; Sewanee Review (Tennessee); Fall 2010.
“[The racehorse Mad About You had] success a month ago, but she caught a tartar in John Hayden’s Emily Blake.” – Damien McElroy; Curtain Cruise Thrills Cumani; Irish Independent (Dublin); May 5, 2009.
Explore “tartar” in the Visual Thesaurus.
http://visualthesaurus.com/?w1=tartar