Today in History (December 13th):
1545: The Council of Trent began.
1642: Dutch navigator Abel Tasman discovered New Zealand.
1816: The United States’ first savings bank, the Provident Institution for Savings, opened in Boston.
1818: Birthdays: Former U.S. first lady Mary Todd Lincoln.
1835: Birthdays: Clergyman Phillips Brooks, who wrote the Christmas carol O Little Town of Bethlehem.
1862: An estimated 11,000 northern soldiers were killed or wounded in a battle with Confederate troops outside Fredericksburg, Va.
1887: Birthdays: World War I hero Sgt. Alvin York.
1910: Birthdays: Actor Van Heflin.
1920: Birthdays: Former U.S. Secretary of State George Shultz.
1923: Birthdays: Baseball Hall of Fame member Larry Doby, the first American League African-American player.
1925: Birthdays: Comedian/actor/dancer Dick Van Dyke.
1929: Birthdays: Actor Christopher Plummer.
1941: Birthdays: Singer/actor John Davidson.
1942: Birthdays: Baseball Hall of Fame member Ferguson Jenkins.
1945: Birthdays: Political figure Herman Cain.
1948: Birthdays: Rock singer Ted Nugent.
1950: Birthdays: Actor Wendie Malick.
1957: Birthdays: Actor Steve Buscemi.
1959: Birthdays: Actor Johnny Whitaker.
1967: Birthdays: Actor Jamie Foxx.
1982: The Sentry armored car company in New York discovered the overnight theft of $11 million from its headquarters. It was the biggest cash theft in U.S. history at the time.
1989: Birthdays: Singer Taylor Swift.
1990: The last of the U.S. hostages being held by Iraq, five diplomats in Kuwait, flew to freedom.
1992: Ricky Ray, 15, one of three hemophiliac brothers barred from attending a Florida school because they had the AIDS virus, died.
1998: In a non-binding referendum giving Puerto Ricans the opportunity to express a political preference, most voters indicated they wished to remain a U.S. commonwealth.
2000: The U.S. Supreme Court halted the Florida presidential vote recount, in effect giving the presidency to Republican George W. Bush more than a month after the balloting. Winning Florida meant Bush had enough electoral votes to defeat Democrat Al Gore, who won the popular vote.
2001: As the extensive manhunt continued for Osama bin Laden, the U.S. government released a tape of the suspected mastermind of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks in which he spoke of the attacks and voiced pleasure and surprise that so many of the enemy had died. Calling it a Cold War relic, President George W. Bush announced the United States was pulling out of the 1972 Antiballistic Missile Treaty, opening the way for the U.S. Defense Department to test and deploy a missile defense system without restraints. 14 people were killed when gunmen tried to storm the Indian Parliament building in New Delhi.
2002: Cardinal Bernard Law, under fire for allegedly protecting priests accused of abusing minors, resigned as Roman Catholic archbishop of Boston.
2003: A bearded and apparently disoriented Saddam Hussein, the deposed Iraqi president, was captured by U.S. troops in a small underground hideout southeast of his hometown of Tikrit, ending an eight-month manhunt.
2007: A landmark report implicated 89 U.S. major league baseball players, some of them the most dominant figures of the era, in the use of steroids and other illegal performance-enhancing drugs. A federal jury in Miami acquitted one of seven Florida men charged with conspiring to bomb Chicago’s Sears Tower and was unable to reach a verdict on the rest. A mistrial was declared for the other six.
2008: President-elect Barack Obama said job creation and a stronger economy are the yardsticks against which his economic recovery plan should be measured.
2009: Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi suffered a broken nose and two broken teeth when struck by a heavy statuette wielded by a man with a history of mental illness during a political rally in Milan.
2010: U.S. President Barack Obama signed into law school nutrition legislation aimed at improving the quality of school breakfasts, lunches and other foods sold in schools and nutrition programs for young children. A federal judge in Richmond, Va., ruled a key part of the federal healthcare law, calling for most Americans to have health insurance, was unconstitutional. A month earlier another federal judge in Virginia rejected a similar challenge to the new law.
2011: The U.S. National Transportation Safety Board recommended a nationwide ban on using portable electronics while driving. The board cited statistics indicating 3,000 people died in accidents last year related to distracted driving. Mario Monti, an economist and former European Union commissioner, was chosen Italy’s new prime minister, succeeding Silvio Berlusconi, who resigned amid a deepening economic crisis.
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Quotes
“My best birth control now is to leave the lights on.” – Joan Rivers
“Minds are like parachutes, they only work when they are open.” – James Dewar
“The history of every country begins in the heart of a man or a woman.” – Willa Cather
“For a man to achieve all that is demanded of him he must regard himself as greater than he is.” – Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, poet, dramatist, novelist, and philosopher (1749-1832)
Heinrich Heine (1797-1856) German poet:
“Every man, either to his terror or consolation, has some sense of religion.”
“Experience is a good school. But the fees are high.”
“God will forgive me. It’s his job.”
“Great genius takes shape by contact with another great genius, but, less by assimilation than by fiction.”
“I fell asleep reading a dull book and dreamed I kept on reading, so I awoke from sheer boredom.”
“I have never seen an ass who talked like a human being, but I have met many human beings who talked like asses.”
“If the Romans had been obliged to learn Latin, they would never have found time to conquer the world.”
“In earlier religions the spirit of the time was expressed through the individual and confirmed by miracles. In modern religions the spirit is expressed through the many and confirmed by reason.”
“Oh, what lies there are in kisses.”
“Talking and eloquence are not the same: to speak and to speak well are two things. A fool may talk, but a wise man speaks.”
whippersnapper
PRONUNCIATION: (HWIP-uhr-snap-uhr, WIP-)
http://wordsmith.org/words/whippersnapper.mp3
MEANING: (noun), A person regarded as unimportant and presumptuous, especially someone young.
ETYMOLOGY: Perhaps an alteration of whipsnapper, representing noise and uselessness, or an alteration of snippersnapper, similar in sense. Earliest documented use: 1674.
USAGE: “Young high-flyers find it hard to manage older workers, and older curmudgeons resent being bossed about by whippersnappers.” – Age Shall Not Wither Them; The Economist (London, UK); Apr 7, 2011.
Explore “whippersnapper” in the Visual Thesaurus.
http://visualthesaurus.com/?w1=whippersnapper
pavid
PRONUNCIATION: (PAEV-id)
MEANING: (adjective), Easily frightened, fearful, pusillanimous, timorous.
ETYMOLOGY: The etymology of today’s word doesn’t run very deep. It is a thinly veiled copy of Latin pavidus “fearful” from pavere “to quake with fear.” The root here is the same found in putare “to cleanse, think over, reflect,” found in “compute,” “repute,” “dispute,” and others. Other relatives have long since dissipated.
USAGE: “Lana Issacs in accounting is such a pavid lamb, she will never ask for a raise.”
schmutz or shmutz
PRONUNCIATION: (shmuhts, shmoots)
http://wordsmith.org/words/schmutz.mp3
MEANING: noun: Dirt, filth, or any undesirable substance.
ETYMOLOGY: From Yiddish shmuts. Earliest documented use: 1968.
USAGE: “The Broadway local line has the dirtiest cars — with only 27 percent ofthem rated as ‘clean’ in a new subway seat and floor ‘schmutz survey’.” – Vinita Singla and Jeane MacIntosh; R Gets ‘F’ For Filth; New York Post; May 6, 2011.