Today in History (March 8th):
1817: The New York Stock Exchange was established.
1841: Birthdays: U.S. Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
1859: Birthdays: Scottish writer Kenneth Grahame, author (The Wind in the Willows).
1865: Birthdays: American printer and type designer Frederic William Goudy.
1879: Birthdays: German nuclear chemist Otto Hahn, discoverer of nuclear fission.
1902: Birthdays: Actor Louise Beavers.
1910: Birthdays: Actor Claire Trevor.
1913: The Internal Revenue Service began to levy and collect income taxes in the United States.
1917: Strikes and riots in St. Petersburg marked the start of the Russian Bolshevik revolution.
1921: After Germany failed to make its first war reparation payment, French troops occupied Dusseldorf and other towns on the Ruhr River in Germany’s industrial heartland. Birthdays: Actor Alan Hale, Jr.
1922: Birthdays: Actor/dancer Cyd Charisse.
1940: Birthdays: Actor Susan Clark.
1943: Birthdays: Actor Lynn Redgrave.
1945: Birthdays: Former Monkee Micky Dolenz.
1947: Birthdays: Songwriter Carole Bayer Sager.
1953: Birthdays: Baseball Hall of Fame member Jim Rice.
1957: Egypt reopened the Suez Canal to international traffic after Israel withdrew from occupied Egyptian territory.
1959: Birthdays: Actor Aidan Quinn.
1961: Birthdays: Actor Camryn Manheim.
1965: Nearly 4,000 U.S. Marines landed in South Vietnam.
1976: Birthdays: Actor Freddie Prinze Jr.
1977: Birthdays: Actor James Van Der Beek.
1983: U.S. President Ronald Reagan referred to the Soviet Union an evil empire in a speech before the British House of Commons.
1990: Colombia’s M-19 leftist guerrilla group surrendered its arms, ending 16 years of insurrection.
1992: Deaths: Menachem Begin, the stern, hunted Israeli underground leader who won win the Nobel Peace Prize as prime minister for making peace with Egypt, died of heart failure.
1999: Deaths: Baseball great Joe DiMaggio died at age 84.
2003: Israeli helicopters fired missiles at a car in the Gaza Strip, killing a top Hamas leader and three bodyguards.
2004: Writer and actor Spalding Gray, missing for almost two months, was found in New York’s East River, a suspected suicide. As revenge killings continued in Haiti, Boniface Alexandre, the Supreme Court chief justice, was named interim president.
2006: Three Alabama college students reportedly looking for cheap thrills were arrested on charges they set fire to nine rural Baptist churches.
2007: The British House of Commons approved a measure requiring the House of Lords to be elected by the people rather than appointed.
2008: U.S. President George W. Bush vetoed legislation that would have outlawed severe interrogation methods such as waterboarding used by the CIA. Bush said the proposal would eliminate one of the most valuable tools in the war on terror.
2009: U.S. President Barack Obama said the United States may try reconciliation with Taliban moderates in an effort to turn around the Afghan war. A man on a motorcycle drove into a crowd of Baghdad police recruits and detonated an explosive vest, killing 28 people and wounding almost 60 others.
2010: As many as 500 people were killed in a nighttime ethnic cleansing raid on a village near Nigeria’s turbulent city of Jos.
2011: As fighting in Libya between insurgents and forces loyal to Moammar Gadhafi continued and casualties escalated, rebel leaders gave Gadhafi 72 hours to resign or be hunted as a criminal.
2012: The Republican-controlled U.S. Senate rejected a GOP-sponsored effort to push through a Keystone XL pipeline amendment opposed by President Barack Obama. The project would move oil from Alberta, Canada, to southern U.S. refineries. 44 members of a handful of Syrian farm families were killed by government troops in the opposition stronghold area of Homs. Twenty victims were said to be from a single family and 16 from another.
Quotes
“A physician is not angry at the intemperance of a mad patient; nor does he take it ill to be railed at by a man in a fever. Just so should a wise man treat all mankind, as a physician does his patient; and looking upon them only as sick and extravagant.” – Lucius Annaeus Seneca, philosopher (BCE 3-65 CE)
“Happiness is not having what you want; it’s wanting what you have.” – Spencer Johnson
“A bank is a place that will lend you money if you can prove that you don’t need it.” – Bob Hope
“If the world were a logical place, men would ride side saddle.” – Rita Mae Brown
“The only fence against the world is a thorough knowledge of it.” – John Locke, philosopher (1632-1704)
“The highest result of education is tolerance.” – Helen Keller, author and lecturer (1880-1968)
“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)
Oliver Wendell Holmes (1841-1935) American Jurist:
“A goose flies by a chart which the Royal Geographical Society could not mend.”
“A man may fulfill the object of his existence by asking a question he cannot answer, and attempting a task he cannot achieve.”
“A mind that is stretched by a new experience can never go back to its old dimensions.”
“A moment’s insight is sometimes worth a life’s experience.”
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“A new untruth is better than an old truth.”
“A person is always startled when he hears himself called old for the first time.”
“A pun does not commonly justify a blow in return. But if a blow were given for such cause, and death ensued, the jury would be judges both of the facts and of the pun, and might, if the latter were of an aggravated character, return a verdict of justifiable homicide.”
“A thought is often original, though you have uttered it a hundred times.”
“A word is not a crystal, transparent and unchanged; it is the skin of a living thought and may vary greatly in color and content according to the circumstances and time in which it is used.”
“Apology is only egotism wrong side out.”
“As life is action and passion, it is required of a man that he should share the passion and action of his time, at the peril of being not to have lived.”
aegis or egis
PRONUNCIATION: (EE-jis)
http://wordsmith.org/words/aegis.mp3
MEANING: (noun), Protection, support, guidance, or sponsorship of a particular person or organization.
ETYMOLOGY: From Latin aegis, from Greek aigis (goatskin), from aix (goat). Aigis was the name of the shield or breastplate of Zeus or Athena in Greek mythology. It was made of goatskin. Earliest documented use: 1704.
USAGE: “‘I hope that the European Commission will take these projects under its aegis,’ president Yushchenko said.” – Yushchenko Hopes European Commission Will Take Gas-transit Modernization Projects Under Its Aegis; Kyiv Post (Ukraine); Mar 23, 2009.
Explore “aegis” in the Visual Thesaurus.
http://visualthesaurus.com/?w1=aegis
shambolic
PRONUNCIATION: (sham-BOL-ik)
http://wordsmith.org/words/shambolic.mp3
MEANING: adjective: Chaotic, disorganized, or confused.
ETYMOLOGY: From shambles (a state of disorder). Earliest documented use: 1970.
USAGE: “Music critic Glenn A Baker says Whitney Houston’s shambolic tour of Australia in 2010 highlighted her personal struggles.” – Whitney Houston’s death ‘tragic, but no surprise’; The Sydney Morning Herald (Australia); Feb 12, 2012.
Explore “shambolic” in the Visual Thesaurus.
http://visualthesaurus.com/?w1=shambolic
steenth
PRONUNCIATION: (steenth)
http://wordsmith.org/words/steenth.mp3
MEANING: (adjective)
1. Latest in an indefinitely long sequence.
2. One sixteenth.
ETYMOLOGY: Alteration of the word sixteenth.
NOTES: The formation of the word “steenth” from “sixteenth” took place through a process called aphesis (from Greek, literally “a letting go”). Aphesis is when an unstressed sound from the beginning of a word get lost over time. Some other examples are:
“cute” from “acute”
“’tis” from “it is”
“gypsy” from “Egyptian”, from the belief that Gypsies came from Egypt (they actually came from India).
USAGE: “And for the steenth time I wondered why he hadn’t phoned me.” – Robert A. Heinlein; The Cat Who Walks Through Walls; Putnam Publishing; 1985.
infundibuliform
PRONUNCIATION: (in-fuhn-DIB-yuh-luh-form)
http://wordsmith.org/words/infundibuliform.mp3
MEANING: (adjective), Funnel-shaped.
ETYMOLOGY: From Latin infundibulum (funnel), from infundere (to pour in), from fundere (to pour). Ultimately from the Indo-European root gheu (to pour) that is also the source of funnel, font, fuse, diffuse, gust, gush, and geyser.
USAGE: “[Yossarian] might have remained in the hospital until doomsday had it not been for that patriotic Texan with his infundibuliform jowls and his lumply rumpleheaded, indestructible smile.” – Josph Heller; Catch-22; Simon & Schuster; 1961.
Should We Fulminate Over ‘Fulsome’?
In the film “Zero Dark Thirty,” the C.I.A. interrogator played by Jessica Chastain castigates a detainee for not being “fulsome” in his responses. She means that he hasn’t provided a full account of his activities and associates.
But we English teachers want the captive to respond, “You’re right. I didn’t lard my narrative with exaggerated language, glittering adjectives and excessive description.”
That’s because, for the past 400 years, “fulsome” has meant, not “full” or “complete,” but “excessively complimentary, flattering, cloying.” “Fulsome praise” usually refers to compliments that are nauseating in their excess, while “fulsome prose” denotes overwritten verbiage.
In “The Old Bachelor,” a 1693 play by William Congreve, for instance, a character denounced “sneering fulsome Lies and nauseous Flattery.” (You can’t help wondering whether a fulsome review of that play might have read, “Greatest hit since the Bible! An immortal blockbuster!”)
But during the past couple of decades, more and more people, apparently oblivious to this negative meaning, have been using “fulsome” to mean “full, complete,” with no negative connotation.
In 2009, for instance, President Barack Obama was talking about his first stimulus package when he pulled a Jessica Chastain. “I just want to make sure,” he said, “that we’re … presenting to the American people a fulsome accounting of what is going on in this program.”
Linguistic purists howled because Obama was clearly using “fulsome” to mean “complete,” not “nauseatingly excessive.”
Ten years ago, the American Heritage Dictionary tested the acceptability of using “fulsome” to mean “full, complete” on its usage panel. Whoa! Only 16 percent of the panel members endorsed the use of “fulsome” to mean “full” in these sentences: “You can adjust the TV’s audio settings for a more fulsome bass,” and “The final report will furnish a more detailed and fulsome discussion.”
So “fulsome” has become what usage expert Bryan Garner calls a “skunked” term; that is, you can’t use “fulsome” in a positive sense without some folks sniffing a whiff of negativity. If a groom thanks his best man for his “fulsome introduction,” what does the groom really mean?
Given the two meanings of “fulsome,” I’d avoid using the word altogether. My hunch is that by, say, 2030 (Twenty Dark Thirty?) the traditional meaning of “excessive” will have faded, and the “full” meaning will predominate.
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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