Today in History (June 21st):
1788: The U.S. Constitution became effective when a ninth state, New Hampshire, ratified it.
1850: Birthdays: Boy Scouts of America founder Daniel Carter Beard.
1887: Queen Victoria celebrated her golden jubilee.
1903: Birthdays: Cartoonist Al Hirschfeld.
1905: Birthdays: Philosopher and author Jean-Paul Sartre.
1921: Birthdays: Actor Jane Russell.
1925: Birthdays: Actor Maureen Stapleton.
1932: Birthdays: Singer O.C. Smith.
1933: Birthdays: Actor Bernie Kopell.
1935: Birthdays: Actor Monte Markham.
1938: Birthdays: Actor Ron Ely.
1940: Birthdays: Actor/TV host Mariette Hartley.
1941: Birthdays: Comic actor Joe Flaherty.
1944: Birthdays: Rock and Roll Hall of Fame member Ray Davies (The Kinks).
1945: Japanese defenders of Okinawa Island surrendered to U.S. troops.
1947: Birthdays: Actor Michael Gross; Actor Meredith Baxter; Nobel Peace Prize laureate Shirin Ebadi.
1948: Birthdays: Writer Ian McEwan.
1951: Birthdays: Rock musician Nils Lofgren.
1953: Birthdays: Two-time Prime Minister of Pakistan Benazir Bhutto.
1954: Birthdays: Actor Robert Pastorelli.
1959: Birthdays: Country singer Kathy Mattea.
1960: Birthdays: Sportscaster Kevin Harlan.
1964: Three civil rights workers disappeared on their way to investigate a church burning in Philadelphia, Miss. Their bodies were found buried in an earthen dam Aug. 4.
1967: Birthdays: Prime Minister of Thailand Yingluck Shinawatra.
1972: Hurricane Agnes hit the eastern U.S. seaboard, killing 118 people over a seven-state area.
1973: Birthdays: Actor Juliette Lewis.
1981: Birthdays: Rock musician Brandon Flowers.
1982: John Hinckley Jr. was found innocent by reason of insanity in the March 1981 shootings of U.S. President Ronald Reagan and three other people. Birthdays: Britain’s Prince William.
1985: International experts in Sao Paulo, Brazil, conclusively identified the bones of a 1979 drowning victim as the remains of Dr. Josef Mengele, a Nazi war criminal, ending a 40-year search for the angel of death of the Auschwitz concentration camp.
1990: An earthquake measuring 7.7 on the Richter scale struck northwestern Iran, killing as many as 50,000 people.
1997: Cambodia announced the capture of former Khmer Rouge leader Pol Pot.
1998: Opposition leader Andres Pastrana Arango was elected president of Colombia by a narrow margin.
2000: NASA announced that its Mars Global Surveyor had spotted grooved surface features, suggesting a relatively recent water flow on the planet.
2004: Connecticut Gov. John Rowland resigned. He faced possible impeachment charges in a scandal involving state contractors.
2005: A Mississippi jury convicted 80-year-old former Ku Klux Klan leader Edgar Ray Killen of manslaughter in the 1964 killings of three civil rights workers. He was sentenced to 60 years in prison.
2007: U.S. President George Bush’s public approval rating hit a low, 26 percent, in a Newsweek poll while Congress’ rating was 25 percent. In the previous 35 years, only Richard Nixon had a lower Newsweek approval rating — 23 percent in 1974.
2008: More than 1,300 people, most of them on a ferry that capsized, were reported killed in Typhoon Fengshen in the Philippines.
2010: The U.S. Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of a law making it a crime to provide material support to a foreign terrorist organization.
2011: A RusAir passenger plane flying from Moscow to Petrozavodsk in rain and fog crashed on a highway near the airport and broke apart in flames. Forty-four people died, eight survived.
2012: The White House announced the resignation of Commerce Secretary John Bryson, who was involved in two traffic accidents after suffering a seizure.
Quotes
“The only people who cannot change are the most wise and the most stupid.” – Confucius
“As a well-spent day brings happy sleep, so life well used brings happy death.” – Leonardo da Vinci, 1452-1519
“Men have slow reflexes. In general it takes several generations later for them to understand.” – Stanislaw J. Lec, poet and aphorist (1909-1966)
“To freely bloom – that is my definition of success.” – Gerry Spence, lawyer (b. 1929)
Mary McCarthy (1912-1989) US writer:
“A society person who is enthusiastic about modern painting or Truman Capote is already half a traitor to his class. It is middle-class people who, quite mistakenly, imagine that a lively pursuit of the latest in reading and painting will advance their status in the world.”
You are advised to consult a physician to find out if free viagra canada any medical illness is bothering you. The slowdown in the growth of thebrainis linked with the earlier mentioned pathologies. female viagra samples Pounding orbiting of the pill ought to be kept in mind always when the person takes the cheap viagra without prescription pill. The better-known pumps sell for generic viagra professional prices of around 200 GBP/400 USD (2006). “Bureaucracy, the rule of no one, has become the modern form of despotism.”
“Congress – these, for the most part, illiterate hacks whose fancy vests are spotted with gravy and whose speeches, hypocritical, unctuous and slovenly, are spotted also with the gravy of political patronage.”
“Europe is the unfinished negative of which America is the proof.”
“Every age has a keyhole to which its eye is pasted.”
“Every word she writes is a lie, including and and the.”
“I am putting real plums into an imaginary cake.”
“I’m afraid I’m not sufficiently inhibited about the things that other women are inhibited about for me. They feel that you’ve given away trade secrets.”
auscultate
PRONUNCIATION: (AW-skuhl-tayt)
http://wordsmith.org/words/auscultate.mp3
MEANING: (verb tr.), To listen to the sounds made by internal organs (heart, lungs, etc.) to aid in the diagnosis.
ETYMOLOGY: Back-formation from auscultation, from auscultare (to listen). Ultimately from the Indo-European root ous- (ear) which is also the source of ear, aural, and scout. Earliest documented use: 1862; auscultation is from 1634.
USAGE: “A Chinese official has been jailed for two years for deserting a sick beggar in a neighboring county and causing the man’s death. … In his defence, Chen said he had asked a general practitioner to auscultate him before the man was sent away. The doctor said his heart beat was normal.” – Chinese Official Jailed; Xinhua News Agency (Beijing, China); Dec 6, 2007.
Explore “auscultate” in the Visual Thesaurus.
http://visualthesaurus.com/?w1=auscultate
persnickety
PRONUNCIATION: (puhr-SNIK-i-tee)
http://wordsmith.org/words/persnickety.mp3
MEANING: (adjective)
1. Fussy about minor details.
2. Snobbish.
3. Requiring keen attention to detail, as a job.
ETYMOLOGY: Variant of pernickety (the spelling still used in the UK). Of unknown origin.
USAGE:
“My father and I are both persnickety. We don’t like noise in the kitchen, and a few grains of salt on a tablecloth make us shiver.” – Cedric Vongerichten; Le Fils; New York Magazine; Sep 20, 2009.
“And what will the filmmakers eventually get for more than 12 hours of painstaking persnickety work?” – Tina Maples; “Dillinger: Gangsters Hit the Library For a Long Shoot; Journal Sentinel (Milwaukee, Wisconsin); May 28, 1990.
Explore “persnickety” in the Visual Thesaurus.
http://visualthesaurus.com/?w1=persnickety
eleemosynary
PRONUNCIATION: (el-uh-MOS-uh-ner-ee, el-ee-, -MOZ-)
http://wordsmith.org/words/eleemosynary.mp3
MEANING: (adjective), Relating to charity.
ETYMOLOGY: From Latin eleemosynarius, from eleemosyna (alms), from Greek eleemosyne (pity, charity), from eleemon (pitiful), from eleos (pity).
USAGE: “The Guzmans started their non-profit organization, Path of Hope Foundation, 18 years ago. Their single goal: to care for the poor who live near their corner. The Thanksgiving dinner is one of their eleemosynary events.” – Lynn Seeden; Free Thanksgiving Dinner Feeds 1,400; Orange County Register (Santa Ana, California); Dec 4, 2003.
Are Poisoned Cookies Just Desserts?
Q: I have always thought the phrase was “just desserts” to indicate getting one’s comeuppance. But I so frequently see it in print as “just deserts.” So which is it, and where did the phrase come from? –Jean Bayer via email
A: The correct term is “just deserts.” The “deserts” in this phrase, though spelled like “deserts” (arid places) and pronounced like “desserts,” is not related to either word. This “deserts” is derived from the same root as “deserve” and means “consequences that someone deserves.”
Further compounding the confusion is that people inevitably make puns on the sound-alike words “deserts” and “desserts.” As the editor of a company magazine, for instance, I once ran a photo of an executive nicknamed “Papa” being bombarded with custard pies at a charity event. I couldn’t resist the headline “Papa Gets His Just Desserts.”
It’s worth noting that “just deserts” is most often used in a negative sense, referring to a punishment or comeuppance that a miscreant or villain deserves.
“Comeuppance,” by the way, was coined during a verbal craze of the mid-1800s when Americans were obsessed with creating colorful compound words. This frenzy produced terms such as “maker-upper,” “filler-inner” and “come-outer,” and explains why grizzled cowboys in westerns always ask the barkeep for a little “picker-upper.”
First appearing in print in 1859, “comeuppance” is based on the notion that someone finally “comes up” against a negative consequence he deserves, in other words, gets his just deserts.
Q: Can you explain the differences among “caret,” “carat” and “karat”? –Dick Wenner, West Hartford, Conn.
A: To make the three definitions of these “carrots” stick, I’ll need a carrot and a stick.
First, the stick — A caret is a typographic mark used to indicate an insertion (^). A carat is a unit of weight for gemstones (“a 3-carat diamond”). A karat is a unit of fineness for gold (“a 24-karat gold bracelet”).
Now the carrot — Here are three handy mnemonics: “Careful editors use carets” (care-carets); “Caravans carry diamonds” (caravan-carat); and “Fine karate wins gold” (karate-karat).
One more little carrot: In researching this subject, I found this 1-carat gem: “Caret” comes not, as I had always assumed, from its resemblance to a carrot (^), but from the Latin verb “carere” (to lack, be without).
Word Guy gets his comeuppance!.
Rob Kyff, a teacher and writer in West Hartford, Conn., invites your language sightings. Send your reports of misuse and abuse, as well as examples of good writing, via e-mail to Wordguy@aol.com or by regular mail to Rob Kyff, Creators Syndicate, 737 3rd Street, Hermosa Beach, CA 90254
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