Today in History (May 16th):
1770: Marie Antoinette (age 14) married Louis-Auguste (age 15).
1801: Birthdays: William Seward, U.S. secretary of state whose purchase of Alaska from Russia in 1867 for $7.2 million was called Seward’s Folly.
1804: The French Senate declared Napoleon Bonaparte emperor.
1824: Birthdays: Banker Levi Morton, U.S. vice president under Benjamin Harrison.
1831: Birthdays: David Hughes, British inventor of the microphone.
1871: U.S. Marines landed in Korea in an attempt to open the country to foreign trade.
1905: Birthdays: Actor Henry Fonda.
1912: Birthdays: Author Louis Studs Terkel.
1913: Birthdays: Bandleader Woody Herman.
1919: Birthdays: Entertainer Liberace.
1920: Joan of Arc was canonized as a saint of the Roman Catholic Church.
1928: Birthdays: New York Yankees player/Manager Billy Martin.
1929: The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences was awarded the first Oscars. Wings was named Best Picture.
1953: Birthdays: Irish actor Pierce Brosnan.
1955: Birthdays: Olympic gold medal gymnast Olga Korbut; Actor Debra Winger.
1959: Birthdays: Actor Mare Winningham.
1966: Birthdays: Singer Janet Jackson.
1969: The unmanned Soviet spacecraft Venera 5 landed on Venus. Birthdays: Actor Tracey Gold; Political commentator Tucker Carlson; Actor David Boreanaz.
1970: Birthdays: Argentine tennis player Gabriela Sabatini.
1973: Birthdays: Actor Tori Spelling.
1986: Birthdays: Actor Megan Fox.
1988: U.S. Surgeon General C. Everett Koop described nicotine as addictive as heroin or cocaine and called for the licensing of tobacco product vendors.
1995: The leader of a Japanese religious cult was charged with murder and attempted murder in March nerve-gas attacks in a Tokyo subway that killed 12 people and injured more than 5,000.
1997: U.S. President Bill Clinton apologized for the Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male, which was conducted from 1932-72. Mobutu Sese Seko — who ruled Zaire for more than 30 years, allegedly looting it of billions of dollars — fled the capital as rebel forces advanced.
2003: Suicidal militants set off five bombs simultaneously in Casablanca, Morocco, killing 41 people and injuring about 100.
2005: Newsweek, after a public apology, printed a retraction to a story that accused interrogators at the U.S. detention center at Guantanamo Bay of flushing a copy of the Koran down a toilet. Riots in Afghanistan that followed the story claimed 16 lives. A U.S. Senate panel said high-ranking Russian politicians made illicit multimillion-dollar oil transactions with Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein under the U.N. oil-for-food program.
2006: Italian President Giorgio Napolitano appointed Romano Prodi premier amid charges of election fraud from outgoing Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi.
2007: Iraqi police said a bomb northeast of Baghdad killed 32 people and injured 60 others but didn’t contain chlorine gas as earlier reported.
2009: A bus collided with stationary truck loaded with diesel fuel in south Nigeria, igniting an explosion and fire that killed at least 50 people.
2010: Former first lady Laura Bush said in a TV interview that she and her husband, former President George W. Bush, were shocked when they learned Iraq had no arsenal of weapons of mass destruction.
2011: The chief prosecutor for the International Criminal Court at The Hague in the Netherlands said he would seek an arrest warrant for Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi for crimes against humanity.
2012: Vermont became the first state to ban hydraulic fracturing to extract gas from underground deposits.
Quotes
“Our lives are like islands in the sea, or like trees in the forest. The maple and the pine may whisper to each other with their leaves … But the trees also commingle their roots in the darkness underground, and the islands also hang together through the ocean’s bottom.” – William James, psychologist and philosopher (1842-1910)
“I feel so miserable without you, it’s almost like having you here.” – Stephen Bishop
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Liberace (1919-1987) Hungarian-born U.S. pianist:
“When the reviews are bad I tell my staff that they can join me as I cry all the way to the bank”
“I had to dare a little bit. Who am I kidding-I had to dare a lot. Don’t wear one ring, wear five or six. People ask how I can play with all those rings, and I reply, ‘Very well, thank you.'”
“You can have either the Resurrection or you can have Liberace. But you can’t have both.”
“You know that bank I used to cry all the way to? I bought it.”
“Nobody will believe in you unless you believe in yourself.”
neophyte
PRONUNCIATION: (NEE-uh-fyt)
MEANING: (noun)
1. A beginner; novice.
2. A new convert to a belief.
ETYMOLOGY: From Middle English, from Late Latin neophytus, from Greek neophytos (newly planted), from phyein (to plant).
USAGE: “After writing critically acclaimed novels with little financial success for over twenty years, Lois became furious when a neophyte, whom had stolen all of his best ideas from her earliest books, had his first book rocket to the top of the sales charts.”
exscind
PRONUNCIATION: (ek-SIND)
http://wordsmith.org/words/exscind.mp3
MEANING: (verb tr.), To cut out or off.
ETYMOLOGY: From Latin exscindere, from ex- (out) + scindere (to cut). Ultimately from the Indo-European root skei- (to cut or split), which also gave us excise, schism, ski, shin, scienter and adscititious. Earliest documented use: 1662.
desultory
PRONUNCIATION: (DES-uhl-tor-ee)
http://wordsmith.org/words/desultory.mp3
MEANING: (adjective)
1. Marked by absence of a plan; disconnected; jumping from one thing to another.
2. Digressing from the main subject; random.
ETYMOLOGY: From Latin desultorius (leaping, pertaining to a circus rider who jumps from one horse to another), from desilire (to leap down), from salire (to jump). Other words derived from the same Latin root, salire, are sally, somersault, insult, result, saute, salient, and saltant. Earliest documented use: 1581.
USAGE: “Anyway, here we are with our little burgers and cokes, making the sort of desultory conversation that those who have been married 30 years make — when this newly married couple walk in.” – Bikram Vohra; Love is the Last Bite; Khaleej Times (Dubai, United Arab Emirates); Apr 16, 2011.
Explore “desultory” in the Visual Thesaurus.
http://visualthesaurus.com/?w1=desultory
vicious circle
PRONUNCIATION: (VISH-uhs SUHR-kuhl)
http://wordsmith.org/words/vicious_circle.mp3
MEANING: (noun), A situation in which a problem causes other problems, which in turn make the original problem worse. A vicious circle can also be a situation where an effort to solve a problem gives rise to the conditions which aggravate the original problem. Also known as vicious cycle. The opposite is virtuous circle.
ETYMOLOGY: From Latin circulus (circle) + vitiosus (flawed). Earliest documented use: 1792.
USAGE: “‘It’s a vicious circle: no R&D investment, no drugs, no revenue, no R&D investment,’ Mardi Dier said.” – Ariel Levy; Drug Test: Letter From Bangalore; The New Yorker; Jan 2, 2012.
Explore “vicious circle” in the Visual Thesaurus.
http://visualthesaurus.com/?w1=vicious+circle