Today in History (June 7th):
1099: The Siege of Jerusalem began.
1776: The Lee Resolution, which led to the U.S. Declaration of Independence, was introduced in the Continental Congress.
1778: Birthdays: British fashion-plate George Beau Brummell.
1848: Birthdays: French post-Impressionist painter Paul Gauguin.
1864: Republican delegates meeting in Baltimore nominated Abraham Lincoln as president. His running mate was Andrew Johnson.
1900: Birthdays: Bandleader Glen Gray.
1909: Birthdays: Actor Jessica Tandy.
1917: Birthdays: Actor-singer Dean Martin; Poet Gwendolyn Brooks, the first black woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for poetry.
1940: Birthdays: Singer Tom Jones.
1942: Japanese forces occupied Attu and Kiska in the Aleutian Islands. U.S. forces retook the islands one year later.
1946: Birthdays: Talk-show host Jenny Jones.
1952: Birthdays: Actor Liam Neeson.
1958: Birthdays: Singer/songwriter Prince.
1965: The U.S. Supreme Court struck down a Connecticut law banning contraceptives.
1975: The first videocassette recorder went on sale to the public.
1981: Birthdays: Former tennis player Anna Kournikova.
1982: Israeli jets bombed central Beirut while Israeli ground forces captured Beaufort Castle and surrounded the Lebanese city of Sidon.
1983: One day after Nicaragua expelled three U.S. diplomats, the Reagan administration ordered six Nicaraguan consulates closed and expelled six of the country’s diplomats.
1988: Birthdays: Actor Michael Cera.
1990: South African President F.W. de Klerk lifted a 4-year-old nationwide state of emergency in all but the strife-torn Indian Ocean province of Natal.
1996: Max Factor, who pioneered smudge-proof lipstick, died.
2002: U.S. missionary Martin Burnham, captured in the Philippines by a Muslim group more than a year earlier, was fatally shot during a rescue attempt.
2004: A classified U.S. Department of Defense report said the United States, under national security considerations, wasn’t bound by international laws prohibiting torture.
2008: U.S. Sen. Hillary Clinton, D-N.Y., officially ended her campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination and endorsed Sen. Barack Obama for president.
2009: A coalition of pro-Western and anti-Syria parties outpolled the militant Hezbollah faction to retain its parliamentary majority in Lebanon.
2010: Countrywide Home Loans, now a part of Bank of America, agreed to settle a $108 million Federal Trade Commission penalty for allegedly gouging customers trying to save their home loans from default and their houses from foreclosure.
2012: U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said Syrian President Bashar Assad has doubled down on his brutality and duplicity. She said Syria cannot be peaceful or stable until Assad goes.
Quotes
“Talent develops in quiet, Character in the torrent of the world.” – Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
“True debauchery is liberating because it creates no obligations.” – Albert Camus
“Lying to ourselves is more deeply ingrained than lying to others.” – Fyodor Dostoevsky, novelist (1821-1881)
“A lawn is nature under totalitarian rule.” – Michael Pollan, author, journalism professor (b. 1955)
“I have never gone to sleep with a grievance against anyone. And, as far as I could, I have never let anyone go to sleep with a grievance against me.” – Abba Agathon, monk (4th/5th century)
Elizabeth Bowen (1899-1973) English writer:
“All your youth you want to have your greatness taken for granted; when you find it taken for granted, you are unnerved.”
“Art is one thing that can go on mattering once it has stopped hurting.”
“Experience isn’t interesting until it begins to repeat itself. In fact, till it does that, it hardly is experience.”
“Fate is not an eagle, it creeps like a rat.”
“Intimacies between women often go backwards, beginning in revelations and ending in small talk.”
“It is in this unearthly first hour of spring twilight that earth’s almost agonized livingness is most felt. This hour is so dreadful to some people that they hurry indoors and turn on the lights.”
“It is not helpful to help a friend by putting coins in his pockets when he has got holes in his pockets.”
“It is not our exalted feelings, it is our sentiments that build the necessary home.”
“No object is mysterious. The mystery is your eye.”
susurrus
PRONUNCIATION: (soo-SUHR-uhs)
http://wordsmith.org/words/susurrus.mp3
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MEANING: (noun), A whispering or rustling sound.
ETYMOLOGY: From Latin susurrus (whisper, humming), from susurrare (to whisper or hum), of imitative origin. Earliest documented use: 1826.
USAGE: “A susurrus of dismay rustled through the ranks of the Aboriginal leaders gathered there.” – Annabel Crabb; Gracious Rudd Turns Grubby; The Sydney Morning Herald (Australia); Oct 31, 2009.
Explore “susurrus” in the Visual Thesaurus.
http://visualthesaurus.com/?w1=susurrus
cull
PRONUNCIATION: (kuhl)
http://wordsmith.org/words/cull.mp3
MEANING: (verb tr.)
1. To select the best.
2. To select inferior items for removing.
3. To reduce the size of a herd.
ETYMOLOGY: From Old French cuillir (to pick), from Latin colligere (to collect). Ultimately from the Indo-European root leg- (to collect), which is also the source of lexicon, legal, dialog, lecture, logic, legend, logarithm, intelligent, diligent, sacrilege, elect, and loyal. Earliest documented use: 1330.
USAGE:
“Susan Kelly is interested in culling the best ideas from all over the world.” – Eleanor Clift; Fresh Eyes on Medical Care; Newsweek (New York); Oct 29, 2009.
“Lacklustre performances by New Zealand teams have led to calls to cull one of them.” – Adrian Seconi; NZ Officials Oppose Dropping Team; Otago Daily Times (New Zealand); May 16, 2012.
Explore “cull” in the Visual Thesaurus.
http://visualthesaurus.com/?w1=cull
starets
PRONUNCIATION: (STAHR-its, -yits) plural startsy (STAHRT-see)
http://wordsmith.org/words/starets.mp3
MEANING: (noun), A religious teacher or adviser.
ETYMOLOGY: From Russian starets (elder). In the Eastern Orthodox Church a starets is a spiritual adviser who is not necessarily a priest.
USAGE: “Grigori Rasputin, was neither mad nor a monk, but an unconventional starets.” – Cecilia Rasmussen; Shadowed by Rasputin’s Evil Reputation; Los Angeles Times; Oct 10, 1999.
Explore “starets” in the Visual Thesaurus.
http://visualthesaurus.com/?w1=starets
churrigueresque
PRONUNCIATION: (choor-ee-guh-RESK)
http://wordsmith.org/words/churrigueresque.mp3
MEANING: (adjective), Baroque; lavish; over-the-top. Also, churrigueresco.
ETYMOLOGY: After José Benito Churriguera (1650-1725), Spanish architect and sculptor, whose family was known for extravagant architectural decorations.
USAGE:
“I had what I considered to be a reasonable plan for finding out what was going on in McAllen, Texas. I would call on the heads of its hospitals, in their swanky, decorator-designed, churrigueresco offices, and I’d ask them.” – Atul Gawande; The Cost Conundrum; The New Yorker; Jun 1, 2009.
“With Chihuly, who works with an army of technicians, everything depends on visual excess. He is the most baroque of modern artists — or more accurately, his art belongs to the tradition of the Churrigueresque.” – Richard Dorment; The Mind-blowing Gift of a Master; The Daily Telegraph (London, UK); Feb 20, 2009.
How ‘Cliche’ Clicked Into English
Asked to use “cliche” in a sentence, a student once responded, “My father came home last night with a cliche on his face.” When the puzzled teacher asked the student to define “cliche,” he replied, “a tired, worn-out expression.”
Before you’re caught with a cliche on your face, let’s examine the origins of five words for overused terms: “cliche,” “stereotype,” “boilerplate,” “banal” and “trite.”
Three of these words derive from printing, a process that involves repetition. Until the 1970s, newspapers and other publications were printed from metal plates of type. To make such a plate, compositors would set the type, create a mold of the printing surface and then drop the mold into hot, molten metal.
The mold made a clicking sound when it hit the hot metal, so 19th-century French printers dubbed the image created by this metal plate a “clicher,” from the French verb “clicher” (to click). Because a clicher is the same image printed repeatedly, “cliche” soon acquired an extended meaning of a phrase used over and over again.
French printer No. 1: I’m going to scream if I hear ze boss use ze term “grow ze business” one more time!
French printer No. 2: Oui! That phrase, she is like a clicher!
Another French word for a printed image was “stereotype,” from the Greek “stereos” (solid) and the French “type” (type). “Stereotype” soon became a general term for an image perpetuated without change and, in 1922, was first used with the metaphoric meaning of “a preconceived, prejudicial or oversimplified notion.”
Some parts of newspapers, such as advertisements and syndicated columns, were printed from prefabricated plates that came in ready-to-use form. These plates resembled the heavy iron plates used to make boilers, so printers called them “boilerplates.”
Because the material on these boilerplates was standard and pre-determined, people started referring to conventional text inserted into legal contracts, disclaimers and speeches as “boilerplate.”
“Banal” comes from “ban,” an old word meaning a payment for something owned or used in common, such as a communal mill or oven. Thus, “banal” came to mean “commonplace, ordinary, petty.”
“Trite,” which is derived from “tritus,” the past-participle of the Latin verb “tero” (to rub, wear out), means “worn out by constant use or repetition,” as in, “When my father came home from the office last night, he looked trite.”
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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