Today in History (March 26th):
First day of Passover
1830: The Book of Mormon was published.
1839: The first Henley Royal Regatta was held.
1874: Birthdays: Poet Robert Frost.
1904: Birthdays: Mythologist and writer Joseph Campbell.
1911: Birthdays: Playwright Tennessee Williams.
1914: Birthdays: U.S. Army Gen. William Westmoreland.
1925: Birthdays: French composer/conductor Pierre Boulez.
1930: Birthdays: Former U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor.
1931: Birthdays: Actor Leonard Nimoy.
1934: Birthdays: Actor Alan Arkin.
1940: Birthdays: Actor James Caan; Former Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif.
1942: Birthdays: Author Erica Jong.
1943: Birthdays: Author/journalist Bob Woodward.
1944: Birthdays: Singer Diana Ross.
1948: Birthdays: Rock ‘n’ roll Hall of Fame member Steven Tyler.
1949: Birthdays: Actor Vicki Lawrence.
1950: Birthdays: Singer Teddy Pendergrass; Actor Martin Short.
1953: U.S. medical researcher Dr. Jonas Salk announced on a national radio show that he had successfully tested a vaccine against poliomyelitis, the virus that causes the crippling disease of polio.
1957: Birthdays: TV personality Leeza Gibbons.
1958: The United States army launched Explorer III.
1960: Birthdays: Actor Jennifer Grey.
1968: Birthdays: Country singer Kenny Chesney.
1971: East Pakistan achieved independence as Bangladesh.
1975: The city of Hue in South Vietnam fell to the North Vietnamese army.
1979: Israel and Egypt signed a peace treaty at the White House, ending 30 years of hostilities.
1985: Birthdays: Actor Keira Knightley.
1991: Mali’s dictator was overthrown in violent overnight military coup. Fifty-nine people died. The Pakistani hijackers of a Singapore Airlines jet were killed by government commandos in Singapore. The passengers and crew members were safe.
1992: Former heavyweight boxing champion Mike Tyson was sentenced to six years in prison for raping a teenage beauty pageant contestant. Soviet cosmonaut Serge Krikalev, after spending 313 days in orbit aboard the Mir space station, returned to Earth a citizen of a new country, Russia. While he was in space, the Soviet Union had crumbled.
1997: 39 members of the Heaven’s Gate religious cult were found dead in a large house in Rancho Mirage, Calif., in an apparent mass suicide.
1998: Bill Clinton became the first U.S. president to visit South Africa.
1999: Dr. Jack Kevorkian, the euthanasia advocate, was convicted of second-degree murder in an Oakland County, Mich., courtroom for the videotaped medicide of a man suffering from Lou Gehrig’s disease.
2000: Acting Russian President Vladimir Putin was elected president by a more than 20 percent margin.
2005: The family of Terri Schiavo said no more federal appeals on behalf of the brain-damaged Florida woman were planned after a judge rejected an emergency plea to have her feeding tube reinserted.
2006: Ukraine’s opposition Regions Party won the parliamentary elections, with former Prime Minister Viktor Yanukovich returning to his post under President Viktor Yushchenko. Scotland banned smoking in all public places. A BBC poll indicated about 21 percent of adults surveyed said they would ignore the law.
2007: U.S. President George W. Bush met with chairmen of General Motors, Ford and Chrysler to discuss alternative fuels. Bush wanted gasoline consumption reduced 20 percent over the next decade. Rival leaders of Northern Ireland met for the first time to work out a power-sharing government.
2010: Officials in South China said a drought had become so severe that wells dried up, leaving 18 million people without drinking water. Reports from Port-au-Prince said the 1.3 million Haitians left homeless by an earthquake two months earlier faced the additional problem of torrential rains flooding their makeshift housing.
2011: In the smoldering wake of allied airstrikes, Libyan rebels recaptured the eastern oil town of Ajdabiya. Japanese nuclear experts said radioactive matter was found at a concentration 1,250 times the legal limit near the drains of the four reactors battered by an earthquake and tsunami, but that the sea would significantly dilute it.
2012: The U.S. Supreme Court opened three days of debate on the constitutionality of President Barack Obama’s healthcare plan.
Quotes
“We should be slower to think that the man at his worst is the real man, and certain that the better we are ourselves the less likely is he to be at his worst in our company. Every time he talks away his own character before us he is signifying contempt for ours.” – James M. Barrie, novelist, short-story writer, and playwright (1860-1937)
“There is nobody so irritating as somebody with less intelligence and more sense than we have.” – Don Herold
“Practice Golden-Rule 1 of Management in everything you do. Manage others the way you would like to be managed.” – Brian Tracy
“We have problems with our physical security, operational security through to management.” – Kevin Mitnick
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Sandra Day O’Connor (1930- )U.S. lawyer and associate justice of the U.S. Supreme Court:
“Do the best you can in every task, no matter how unimportant it may seem at the time. No one learns more about a problem than the person at the bottom.”
“I don’t know that there are any shortcuts to doing a good job.”
“We don’t accomplish anything in this world alone… and whatever happens is the result of the whole tapestry of one’s life and all the weavings of individual threads form one to another that creates something.”
“Slaying the dragon of delay is no sport for the short-winded.”
“Young women today often have very little appreciation for the real battles that took place to get women where they are today in this country. I don’t know how much history young women today know about those battles.”
“Society as a whole benefits immeasurably from a climate in which all persons, regardless of race or gender, may have the opportunity to earn respect, responsibility, advancement and remuneration based on ability.”
“Yes, I will bring the understanding of a woman to the Court, but I doubt that alone will affect my decisions. I think the important thing about my appointment is not that I will decide cases as a woman, but that I am a woman who will get to decide cases.”
“The power I exert on the court depends on the power of my arguments, not on my gender.”
“The more education a woman has, the wider the gap between men’s and women’s earnings for the same work.”
“Despite the encouraging and wonderful gains and the changes for women which have occurred in my lifetime, there is still room to advance and to promote correction of the remaining deficiencies and imbalances.”
“Each of us brings to our job, whatever it is, our lifetime of experience and our values.”
“The family unit plays a critical role in our society and in the training of the generation to come.”
“We pay a price when we deprive children of the exposure to the values, principles, and education they need to make them good citizens.”
“The courts of this country should not be the places where resolution of disputes begins. They should be the places where the disputes end after alternative methods of resolving disputes have been considered and tried.”
inveterate
PRONUNCIATION: (in-VET-uhr-it)
MEANING: (adjective)
1. Firmly established by long persistence; deep-rooted; of long standing.
2. Fixed in habit by long persistence; confirmed; habitual.
ETYMOLOGY: Inveterate is from the past participle of Latin inveterari, “to grow old, to endure,” from in- + vetus, veter-, “old.” It is related to veteran, “one who is long experienced in some activity or capacity; an old soldier of long service; one who has served in the armed forces.” The noun form is inveteracy or inveterateness.
USAGE: “Normally an invterate drinker of Scotch, the party seemed to be engulfed by a hushed silence when Alan walked in with an open.
potpourri
PRONUNCIATION: (poh-poo-REE, POH-poo-ree)
http://wordsmith.org/words/potpourri.mp3
MEANING: (noun)
1. A mixture of dried flower petals, spices, herbs, etc., kept for fragrance.
2. A musical medley.
3. A mixture of incongruous things.
ETYMOLOGY: From French pot pourri, literally rotten pot (loan translation of Spanish olla podrida), from pot (pot) + pourri (rotten), from pourrir (to rot). English has borrowed not only the loan translated term potpourri from French, but also the original Spanish olla podrida. It has borrowed from other languages a whole bunch of terms to describe hodgepodge or miscellany, such as, from Swedish smorgasbord, from French salmagundi, and from Hungarian goulash. Earliest documented use: 1611.
USAGE: “The Moisture Festival, an exuberant potpourri of variety and burlesque, is now in its seventh year and as raffishly welcoming as ever.” – Misha Berson; Neo-vaudeville Delights at Moisture Festival’s Opening Night; The Seattle Times; Mar 12, 2010.
Explore “potpourri” in the Visual Thesaurus.
http://visualthesaurus.com/?w1=potpourri
discomfit
PRONUNCIATION: (dis-KUHM-fit)
http://wordsmith.org/words/discomfit.mp3
MEANING: (verb tr.)
1. To confuse or embarrass.
2. To thwart the plans of.
ETYMOLOGY: From Old French desconfit (defeated), past participle of desconfire (to defeat), from des- (not) + confire (to make), from Latin facere (to make). Earliest documented use: around 1230.
USAGE: “Berlusconi accuses politically motivated prosecutors of leaking details of investigations to discomfit him.” – Unbalanced Scales; The Economist (London, UK); Oct 8, 2011.
Explore “discomfit” in the Visual Thesaurus.
http://visualthesaurus.com/?w1=discomfit
dicephalous
PRONUNCIATION: (dai-SEF-uh-luhs)
http://wordsmith.org/words/dicephalous.mp3
MEANING: (adjective), Having two heads.
ETYMOLOGY: From Greek dikephalos (two-headed), from di- (two) + kephale head. Ultimately from the Indo-European root ghebh-el- (head) that is also the root of the word gable. – A synonym of today’s word, bicephalous, also has all unique letters.
USAGE: “A woman pregnant with Siamese twins with two heads and one body has spoken of her decision to keep them. Miss Chamberlain and Mr Pedace, 32, a Roman Catholic, hope their babies will follow the example of 18-year-old American dicephalous twins Abigail and Brittany Hensel, who share a body but lead a full life.” – Ellen Widdup; Woman is Expecting Twins With One Body; The Evening Standard (London, UK); Jan 12, 2009.