Today in History (June 17th):
1703: Birthdays: British clergyman John Wesley, the founder of Methodism.
1867: Birthdays: John Robert Gregg, inventor of the Greeg shorthand system.
1882: Birthdays: Russian-born composer Igor Stravinsky.
1885: The Statute of Liberty arrived in New York Harbor.
1898: Birthdays: Dutch artist M.C. Escher.
1904: Birthdays: Actor Ralph Bellamy.
1914: Birthdays: Author John Hersey.
1923: Birthdays: Football Hall of Fame member Elroy Crazylegs Hirsch.
1942: Birthdays: Egyptian Nobel Peace Prize laureate Mohamed ElBaradei.
1943: Birthdays: Former U.S. House Speaker Newt Gingrich; Singer Barry Manilow.
1947: Birthdays: Musician-songwriter George Clinton.
1951: Birthdays: Comedian Joe Piscopo.
1954: Birthdays: Actor Mark Linn-Baker.
1960: Birthdays: Actor Thomas Haden Church.
1963: Birthdays: Actor Greg Kinnear.
1965: Birthdays: Olympic gold medal speed skater Dan Jansen.
1966: Birthdays: Actor Jason Patric.
1967: China announced it had successfully tested a hydrogen bomb.
1970: Birthdays: Actor Will Forte.
1972: The Watergate scandal began with the arrest of five burglars inside Democratic National Committee headquarters at the Watergate complex in Washington.
1980: Birthdays: Tennis star Venus Williams.
1981: A walkway collapsed at the Hyatt Regency Hotel in Kansas City, Mo., killing 144 people.
1982: Argentina’s President Leopoldo Galtieri resigned in response to Britain’s victory in the Falkland Islands war.
1986: Kate Smith, one of America’s most popular singers in the ’20s, ’30s and ’40s, died at the age of 79.
1991: South African President F.W. de Klerk ended apartheid when he repealed the Population Registration Act that classified South Africans by race from birth.
1994: Los Angeles police charged O.J. Simpson with killing his ex-wife and her friend. The former football star and actor was acquitted in a controversial, high-profile criminal trial.
1996: ValuJet Airlines shut down about a month after a crash in the Florida Everglades led to questions about the carrier’s safety and maintenance records.
2003: Canadian Prime Minister Jean Chretien promised legislation that would legalize same-sex marriage throughout the country.
2004: A massive car bomb killed at least 30 people and wounded 150 others in central Baghdad, two weeks before the handover of power to Iraqis.
2007: A roof collapsed at a burning furniture store in Charleston, S.C., killing nine firefighters.
2009: In a speech to the American Medical Association, U.S. President Barack Obama warned that without action on healthcare reform the rolls of the uninsured will swell to include millions more Americans.
2011: Ayman al-Zawahiri, an Egyptian surgeon and co-founder of al-Qaida, moved up a notch to assume leadership of the terrorist network six weeks after U.S. forces killed Osama bin Laden.
2012: Greece’s center-right New Democracy party claimed victory in the second parliamentary election in six weeks.
Quotes
“When I feed the hungry, they call me a saint. When I ask why people are hungry, they call me a communist.” – Helder Camara, archbishop (1909-1999)
“We must learn to live together as brothers or perish together as fools.” – Martin Luther King, Jr.
“I live my life in widening circles that reach out across the world. I may not complete this last one but I give myself to it.” – Rainer Maria Rilke, poet and novelist (1875-1926)
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“The door of a bigoted mind opens outwards so that the only result of the pressure of facts upon it is to close it more snugly.” – Ogden Nash, author (1902-1971)
Igor Stravinsky (1882-1971) Russian composer/conductor:
“A good composer does not imitate; he steals.”
“A plague on eminence! I hardly dare cross the street anymore without a convoy, and I am stared at wherever I go like an idiot member of a royal family or an animal in a zoo; and zoo animals have been known to die from stares.”
“Film music should have the same relationship to the film drama that somebody’s piano playing in my living room has on the book I am reading.”
“Harpists spend 90 percent of their lives tuning their harps and 10 percent playing out of tune.”
“I am an inventor of music.”
“I am in the present. I cannot know what tomorrow will bring forth. I can know only what the truth is for me today. That is what I am called upon to serve, and I serve it in all lucidity.”
“I have learned throughout my life as a composer chiefly through my mistakes and pursuits of false assumptions, not by my exposure to founts of wisdom and knowledge.”
“I haven’t understood a bar of music in my life, but I have felt it.”
“I know that the twelve notes in each octave and the variety of rhythm offer me opportunities that all of human genius will never exhaust.”
zymurgy
PRONUNCIATION: (ZY-muhr-jee)
http://wordsmith.org/words/zymurgy.mp3
MEANING: (noun), The branch of chemistry dealing with fermentation, as brewing.
ETYMOLOGY: From Greek zym- (ferment) + -urgy (work). Earliest documented use: 1868.
NOTES: While zymurgy’s day job is raising spirits, it also moonlights as the last word in a dictionary. Some dictionaries have employed other, more accomplished, words for the job. Aardvark serves on the opposite end.
USAGE: “Zymurgy’s reek was everywhere.” – Ceylon L. Barclay; Red Rum Punch; Cross Cultural Publications; 1994.
Explore “zymurgy” in the Visual Thesaurus.
http://visualthesaurus.com/?w1=zymurgy
adulate
PRONUNCIATION: (AJ-uh-layt)
http://wordsmith.org/words/adulate.mp3
MEANING: verb tr.: To flatter or admire slavishly.
ETYMOLOGY: Back-formation from adulation, from Latin adulari (to flatter, to fawn upon, like a dog wagging its tail). Earliest documented use: 1777; adulation is from around 1400.
USAGE: “Media will continue to adulate and fawn before celebrities’ feet, like abject courtiers in an imperial palace.” – Kevin Myers; The Words ‘Celebrity’ and ‘Ireland’ Belong in the Same Sentence; Irish Independent (Dublin, Ireland); Sep 30, 2010.
Explore “adulate” in the Visual Thesaurus.
http://visualthesaurus.com/?w1=adulate
melancholic
PRONUNCIATION: (mel-uhn-KOL-ik)
http://wordsmith.org/words/melancholic.mp3
MEANING: (adjective)
1. Gloomy; wistful.
2. Saddening.
3. Of or related to melancholia.
ETYMOLOGY: From Latin melancholia, from Greek melancholia (the condition of having an excess of black bile), from melan- (black) + chole (bile), ultimately from the Indo-European root ghel- (to shine) that is also the source of words such as yellow, gold, glimmer, gloaming, glimpse, glass, arsenic, and cholera.
USAGE: “Zach Galifianakis: The only kind of music I do know how to play is melancholic, sad stuff because nothing happy is coming out of my body musically.” – Kate Ward; Zach Galifianakis; Entertainment Weekly (New York); Jun 4, 2009.