Today in History (November 13th):
354: Birthdays: St. Augustine of Hippo, a theologian.
1312: Birthdays: King Edward III of England.
1850: Birthdays: Scottish author Robert Louis Stevenson.
1856: Birthdays: U.S. Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis.
1911: Birthdays: Negro League player and manager Buck O’Neil.
1927: The Holland Tunnel was opened under the Hudson River, linking New York City and New Jersey.
1932: Birthdays: Actor Richard Mulligan.
1933: The first recorded sit-down strike in the United States was staged by workers at the Hormel Packing Company in Austin, Minn.
1934: Birthdays: TV producer/director Garry Marshall.
1941: Birthdays: Actor Dack Rambo.
1947: Birthdays: Actor Joe Mantegna.
1953: Birthdays: Actor Tracy Scoggins.
1954: Birthdays: Actor Chris Noth.
1955: Birthdays: Actor Whoopi Goldberg.
1956: The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in a case from Montgomery, Ala., that segregation on interstate buses was unconstitutional.
1967: Carl Stokes became the first black U.S. mayor when he was elected in Cleveland. Birthdays: Television talk-show host Jimmy Kimmel; Actor Steve Zahn.
1969: Birthdays: Actor Gerard Butler.
1974: Yasser Arafat told the U.N. General Assembly that the goal of the Palestine Liberation Organization was to establish an independent state of Palestine.
1982: The Vietnam War Memorial was dedicated in Washington.
1985: A volcano erupted in Colombia, killing 25,000 people. It was the third-deadliest volcano disaster in history.
1993: Pakistan’s Foreign Minister Farooq Leghari was chosen president.
1997: Iraq expelled the U.S. members of the U.N. team that had been sent to verify Iraq’s compliance with U.N. directives.
2001: U.S. President George W. Bush and Russian leader Vladimir Putin agreed to reduce stockpiles of nuclear weapons by about two-thirds.
2004: An Iraqi national security adviser said up to 1,000 insurgents were killed in the six-day battle for Fallujah.
2006: As many as 150 people were kidnapped from Iraq’s Ministry of Higher Education in Baghdad by about 80 gunmen in security services uniforms.
2008: Sudanese President Omar Hassan Bashir ordered a cease-fire with rebels in war-torn Darfur and said he would move to disarm pro-government militias. Up to 300,000 inhabitants of Darfur had died since 2003 in what officials called an ethnic cleansing campaign.
2009: The self-proclaimed organizer of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the United States, Khalid Sheik Mohammed, will stand trial in New York, the U.S. Defense Department announced, with the death penalty likely to be sought. Barack Obama, in Tokyo on his first Asian trip as U.S. president, and Japanese Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama recommitted to reduce their countries’ carbon emissions by 80 percent.
2010: The military government of Myanmar, formerly Burma, released pro-democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi from house arrest to cheering crowds. The leader of the National League for Democracy had spent 15 of the past 21 years confined to her home.
2011: Mario Monti, an economist and former EU commissioner, was picked to succeed Silvio Berlusconi as Italy’s prime minister. Berlusconi, 75, resigned after Parliament passed austerity measures to address the country’s $2.6 trillion debt.
Quotes
“In war there is no substitute for victory.” – Douglas MacArthur, U.S. Army General
“It is impossible to enjoy idling thoroughly unless one has plenty of work to do. There is no fun in doing nothing when you have nothing to do. Wasting time is merely an occupation then, and a most exhausting one. Idleness, like kisses, to be sweet must be stolen.” – Jerome K. Jerome, humorist and playwright (1859-1927)
“Rivers know this: there is no hurry. We shall get there some day.” – A. A. Milne author (1882-1956)
Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-1894) Scottish novelist, poet:
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“A friend is a gift you give yourself.”
“All speech, written or spoken, is a dead language, until it finds a willing and prepared hearer.”
“Anyone can carry his burden, however hard, until nightfall. Anyone can do his work, however hard, for one day. Anyone can live sweetly, patiently, lovingly, purely, till the sun goes down. And this is all life really means.”
“Books are good enough in their own way, but they are a poor substitute for life.”
“Don’t judge each day by the harvest you reap but by the seeds that you plant.”
“Each has his own tree of ancestors, but at the top of all sits Probably Arboreal.”
“Everybody, soon or late, sits down to a banquet of consequences.”
“Everyone lives by selling something.”
blitzkrieg
PRONUNCIATION: (BLITS-kreeg)
http://wordsmith.org/words/blitzkrieg.mp3
MEANING:
noun: 1. An intense campaign, for example, an ad blitz. 2. A swift, sudden military attack, especially aerial bombardment.
verb tr.: To attack or destroy in a sudden campaign.
ETYMOLOGY: From German Blitzkrieg, from Blitz (lightning) + Krieg (war). Earliest documented use: 1939.
USAGE:
“It was a blitzkrieg of love, an admiration avalanche.” – Lenore Taylor; Hold on to Your Bonnets; The Sydney Morning Herald (Australia); Oct 6, 2012.
“It’s an engineering blitzkrieg meant to awe the Chinese people and show off the nation’s new industrial might.” – Ian Johnson; China Advances High-Speed Rail Amid Safety, Corruption Concerns; National Geographic (Washington, DC); Oct 5, 2012.
Explore “blitzkrieg” in the Visual Thesaurus.
http://visualthesaurus.com/?w1=blitzkrieg
shanghai
PRONUNCIATION: (SHAENG-hi)
MEANING: verb: To kidnap, steal, or remove in the most egregious manner, especially by drugging or force, an unfortunate misuse of the beautiful name of a lovely Chinese city by the English language.
ETYMOLOGY: When San Francisco was a small frontier town, it was difficult for shippers to find sufficient crews to man the ships that sailed in and out of San Francisco Bay, especially for the long voyages to China. Shippers turned to “crimps,” men who would kidnap others from the dock area by drugging them in bars or elsewhere and taking them out to ships in the harbor. The practice was so rampant at one point that the area of bars and brothels around the San Francisco harbor was called the “Barbary Coast,” after the infamous refuge for pirates on the North African coast. At first, when men disappeared from the Barbary Coast, people would simply say “he’s sailing to Shanghai.” Later the phrase was reduced to today’s verb. “Shanghai” in Chinese comes from shang “above” and hai “sea.”
USAGE: “We mentioned our new product idea to a mail clerk from another company that shanghaied it and put it into production before we could.”
verisimilitude
PRONUNCIATION: (ver-uh-si-MIL-i-tood, -tyood)
http://wordsmith.org/words/verisimilitude.mp3
MEANING: noun:
1. The quality of appearing to be true or real.
2. Something that has the appearance of being true or real.
ETYMOLOGY: From Latin verisimilitudo, from verum (truth) + similis (like). Earliest documented use: 1603.
USAGE: “There are moments in the new musical The Burnt Part Boys that mirror recent events with haunting verisimilitude.” – David Rooney; Fictional Mining Town; The New York Times; May 19, 2010.
Explore “verisimilitude” in the Visual Thesaurus.
http://visualthesaurus.com/?w1=verisimilitude