Today in History (January 4th):
1809: Birthdays: French teacher of the blind Louis Braille.
1813: Birthdays: British shorthand writing system inventor Isaac Pitman.
1838: Birthdays: Charles Stratton, the midget known as Gen. Tom Thumb, a famous entertainer and protege of showman P.T. Barnum.
1885: Dr. William Grant of Davenport, Iowa, performed the first successful appendectomy.
1893: U.S. President Benjamin Harrison granted amnesty to all people who had abstained from practicing polygamy since Nov. 1, 1890. It was part of a deal for Utah to achieve statehood.
1896: Utah admitted to the United States as the 45th state. Birthdays: U.S. Sen. Everett Dirksen, R-Ill.
1905: Birthdays: Actor Sterling Holloway.
1930: Birthdays: Pro Football Hall of Fame coach and player Don Shula.
1935: Birthdays: Former heavyweight boxing champion Floyd Patterson.
1927: Birthdays: Actor Barbara Rush.
1935: Bob Hope made his network radio debut in the cast of The Intimate Revue.
1936: Billboard magazine published the first pop music chart.
1937: Birthdays: Actor Dyan Cannon.
1941: Birthdays: Author Maureen Reagan (daughter of former President Ronald Reagan).
1943: Birthdays: American historian and writer Doris Kearns Goodwin.
1951: Chinese and North Korean forces captured the South Korean capital of Seoul.
1954: A young musician who worked in a machine shop paid $4 to record two songs for his mother. His name: Elvis Presley.
1958: Sputnik 1 fell to Earth from its orbit. Birthdays: Comedian Andy Borowitz.
1960: Birthdays: R.E.M. lead singer Michael Stipe.
1963: Birthdays: Actor Dave Foley.
1965: U.S. President Lyndon Johnson proclaimed the Great Society policy during a State of the Union address to Congress. Birthdays: Actor Julia Ormond.
1974: U.S. President Richard Nixon refused to release any more of the 500 documents subpoenaed by the U.S. Senate Watergate Committee.
1975: Elizabeth Ann Seton was canonized as the first Roman Catholic saint born in America.
1985: Israel confirmed that 10,000 Ethiopian Jews had been flown to Israel. Ethiopia termed the operation a gross interference in its affairs.
1987: Spanish guitar great Andres Segovia arrived in the United States for his final American tour. He died four months later in Madrid at the age of 94.
1993: 25 people, including 18 Americans, were killed when their tour bus traveling on a rain-slick highway near Cancun, Mexico, crashed into a utility pole and burned.
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1995: The 104th U.S. Congress convened with Republicans in control in both houses for the first time since 1953.
2004: The unmanned Mars spacecraft began relaying pictures of a rock-strewn plain to Earth.
2005: Gunmen assassinated the governor of Baghdad, Ali al-Haidri.
2007: The 110th U.S. Congress convened. Democrats held control of both the House of Representatives and Senate. Rep. Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., became the first woman elected Speaker of the House.
2008: The U.S. Labor Department said the American unemployment figure was 5 percent in December.
2010: Iranian Nobel Peace Prize laureate Shirin Ebadi warned the government to back off on its efforts to stifle protests. Thousands attended the opening of the Burj Dubai (Dubai Tower), the world’s tallest building, in the United Arab Emirates. At 2,625 feet, it’s twice as tall as the Empire State Building.
2011: The governor of the Punjab Province in Pakistan, a close ally to the Pakistani president, was assassinated when shot during a motorcade. A security guard was arrested.
2012: Detroit automakers capped a good year with strong December auto sales that put them on course to gain market share for the first year in decades. Sales rose 8.7 percent in the final month of 2011, lifting full-year U.S. auto sales to 12.8 million vehicles, up 10.3 percent from 2010.
Quotes
“Without a struggle, there can be no progress.” – Frederick Douglass
“It is a truism that almost any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creed into law if it acquires the political power to do so.” – Robert A. Heinlein, science-fiction author (1907-1988)
Sir Isaac Newton (1642-1727) English mathematician and physicist:
A man may imagine things that are false, but he can only understand things that are true, for if the things be false, the apprehension of them is not understanding.”
“If I have done the public any service, it is due to my patient thought.”
“If I have seen further than others, it is by standing upon the shoulders of giants.”
“We build too many walls and not enough bridges.”
“There is one thing stronger than all the armies in the world; and that is an idea whose time has come.”
“I can calculate the motion of heavenly bodies but not the madness of people.”
newspeak
PRONUNCIATION: (NOO-speek, NYOO-)
http://wordsmith.org/words/newspeak.mp3
MEANING: noun: Deliberately ambiguous or euphemistic language used for propaganda.
ETYMOLOGY: Coined by George Orwell in his novel Nineteen Eighty-Four. Newspeak was the official language of Oceania. In Newspeak, English was called Oldspeak. Earliest documented use: 1949.
NOTES: The most insidious newspeak term to come out in recent years is for torture. In newspeak it becomes “enhanced interrogation”, as if regular torture makes use of tap water, but in enhanced interrogation you get nothing less than Evian.
USAGE: “An Imperial Tobacco memo predicted that the trend towards fewer smokers could ‘virtually wipe us off the map’ within 50 years. The writer recommended the company target ‘starters’ — company newspeak for teens.” – Mindelle Jacobs; Smoke And Mirrors Fool No One; The Edmonton Sun (Canada); Nov 23, 1999.
Explore “newspeak” in the Visual Thesaurus.
http://visualthesaurus.com/?w1=newspeak