Today in History (April 28th):
1758: Birthdays: James Monroe, fifth president of the United States.
1788: Maryland ratified the U.S. Constitution, becoming the seventh state of the Union.
1789: The most famous of all naval mutinies took place aboard the HMS Bounty en route from Tahiti to Jamaica.
1838: Birthdays: Dutch legal scholar and Nobel Peace Prize laureate Tobias Michael Carel Asser.
1878: Birthdays: Actor Lionel Barrymore.
1908: Birthdays: German industrialist Oskar Schindler, credited with saving almost 1,200 Jews during the World War II Holocaust.
1926: Birthdays: Novelist Harper Lee (To Kill a Mockingbird).
1930: First night game in organized baseball history is played in Independence, Kan. Birthdays: Former U.S. Secretary of State James Baker; Actor Carolyn Jones.
1937: Birthdays: Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein.
1938: Birthdays: Actor Madge Sinclair.
1941: Birthdays: Actor Ann-Margret.
1945: Fascist leader Benito Mussolini, his mistress and several of his friends were executed by Italian partisans.
1947: Thor Heyerdahl and five crew members began a trip from Peru to Polynesia on the Kon-Tiki.
1948: Birthdays: Novelist Terry Pratchett; Actor Marcia Strassman.
1949: Birthdays: Actor Bruno Kirby.
1950: Birthdays: Tonight Show host Jay Leno.
1966: Birthdays: Golfer John Daly.
1974: Birthdays: Actor Penelope Cruz.
1975: The last U.S. civilians were evacuated from South Vietnam as North Vietnamese forces tightened their noose around Saigon.
1981: Birthdays: Actor Jessica Alba.
1986: The Soviet Union announced the Chernobyl nuclear reactor fire had killed two people, with 197 hospitalized. Nine months later, it reported 31 had died and 231 suffered radiation sickness.
1988: An Aloha Airlines Boeing 737 lost an 18-foot chunk of fuselage at 24,000 feet between Hilo and Honolulu, Hawaii, killing a flight attendant. The pilot landed on Maui with the remaining 94 passengers and crew, 61 of them injured.
1993: U.S. Defense Secretary Les Aspin opened combat aircraft to military servicewomen and sought a change in the law to allow women to serve on naval combat vessels.
1994: Former CIA officer Aldrich Ames pleaded guilty to spying for the Soviet Union.
1996: U.S. President Bill Clinton testified via videotape as a defense witness in the Whitewater land trial. A rampage by a gunman in Port Arthur, Tasmania, Australia, killed 35 people.
2001: California businessman Dennis Tito became the first tourist in space. He reportedly paid Russia’s space agency $20 million to give him a ride to the International Space Station.
2004: About 100 people were killed when armed insurgents stormed police stations in southern Thailand.
2005: A Shiite-led Cabinet was approved by Iraq’s National Assembly for its first freely elected government.
2007: U.S. inspectors reported significant problems with reconstruction projects in Iraq, including plumbing and electrical failures and apparent looting. Pakistan’s interior minister was injured slightly in a suicide bombing that killed at least 28 people and injured dozens more in the northwest city of Charsadda.
2008: The U.S. Supreme Court upheld an Indiana law requiring state or federal photo identification to vote.
2009: Three Albanian immigrant brothers were sentenced in Camden, N.J., to life in prison for their part in a plot to attack soldiers at Fort Dix.
2010: A man identified as a teacher from a Chinese village attacked 16 children and another teacher with a knife at a primary school in south China’s Guangdong province.
2011: U.S. President Barack Obama said he would nominate CIA Director Leon Panetta to succeed Robert Gates as defense secretary.
2012: Malaysian police fired tear gas and water cannons at thousands of protesters who defied government warnings and entered Kuala Lumpur’s historic Merdeka (Independence) Square, demanding electoral reform.
Quotes
“Useless laws weaken the necessary laws.” – Charles de Montesquieu, philosopher and writer (1689-1755)
“Our character is what we do when we think no one is looking.” – H. Jackson Brown Jr.
“A society grows great when old men plant trees whose shade they know they shall never sit in.” – Greek proverb
“Everyone is kneaded out of the same dough but not baked in the same oven.” – Yiddish proverb
“Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is not omnipotent. Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent. Is he both able and willing? Then whence cometh evil? Is he neither able nor willing? Then why call him God?” – Epicurus, philosopher (c. 341-270 BCE)
Dolores Huerta (1930- ) American activist:
“Don’t be a marshmallow. Walk the street with us into history. Get off the sidewalk. Stop being vegetables. Work for Justice. Viva the boycott!”
“Giving kids clothes and food is one thing but it’s much more important to teach them that other people besides themselves are important, and that the best thing they can do with their lives is to use them in the service of other people.”
“We criticize and separate ourselves from the process. We’ve got to jump right in there with both feet.”
“If you haven’t forgiven yourself something, how can you forgive others.”
“Among poor people, there’s not any question about women being strong — even stronger than men — they work in the fields right along with the men. When your survival is at stake, you don’t have these questions about yourself like middle-class women do.”
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mojo
PRONUNCIATION: (MO-jo)
http://wordsmith.org/words/mojo.mp3
MEANING: (noun), Magical power; charm.
ETYMOLOGY: Apparently of W. African origin, akin to Gullah moco (witchcraft), Fula moco’o (medicine man). Fula is a language of West Africa. Earliest documented use: 1926.
USAGE: “After losing their mojo, formerly high-flying tech firms rarely recover it.” – Googling A New Boss; The Economist (London, UK); Jul 21, 2012.
Explore “mojo” in the Visual Thesaurus.
http://visualthesaurus.com/?w1=mojo
lollygag
PRONUNCIATION: (LOL-ee-gag)
MEANING: (verb intr.), also lallygag
1. To fool around, waste time, or spend time lazily.
2. To neck.
ETYMOLOGY: Origin uncertain.
USAGE: “Bryan was wont to spend his days lollygagging around while surfing the Internet, accomplishing very little in the way of the actual work he was supposedly being paid for.”
moiety
PRONUNCIATION: (MOY-uh-tee)
MEANING: (noun)
1. One of two equal parts; a half.
2. An indefinite part; a small portion or share.
3. One of two basic tribal subdivisions.
ETYMOLOGY: Moiety comes from Old French meitiet, from Late Latin medietas, from Latin medius, “middle.”
USAGE: “After falling in the mud puddle, Anna did her best to extract herself with a moiety of dignity. However, when she slid back in even that infinitesimal speck was utterly obliterated.”
bootstrap
PRONUNCIATION: (BOOT-strap)
http://wordsmith.org/words/bootstrap.mp3
MEANING:
(verb tr.), To help oneself with one’s own initiative and no outside help.
(noun), Unaided efforts.
(adjective), Reliant on one’s own efforts.
ETYMOLOGY: While pulling on bootstraps may help with putting on one’s boots, it’s impossible to lift oneself up like that. Nonetheless the fanciful idea is a great visual and it gave birth to the idiom “to pull oneself up by one’s (own) bootstraps”, meaning to better oneself with one’s own efforts, with little outside help. It probably originated from the tall tales of Baron Münchausen who claimed to have lifted himself (and his horse) up from the swamp by pulling on his own hair. In computing, booting or bootstrapping is to load a fixed sequence of instructions in a computer to initiate the operating system. Earliest documented use: 1891.
USAGE: “At Yale, Timeica Bethel met and became close with other students who had also bootstrapped themselves out of poverty.” – Colleen Mastony; Timeica Bethel Goes from Chicago’s Housing Projects to Ivy League and Back; Chicago Tribune; Mar 27, 2011.
Explore “bootstrap” in the Visual Thesaurus.
http://visualthesaurus.com/?w1=bootstrap
accrete
PRONUNCIATION: (uh-KREET)
http://wordsmith.org/words/accrete.mp3
MEANING: (verb tr., intr.), To grow gradually by accumulation.
ETYMOLOGY: Back-formation from accretion, from accrescere (to grow). Ultimately from the Indo-European root ker- (to grow) that is also the source of words such as increase, recruit, crew, crescent, cereal, concrete, and crescendo.
USAGE: “Protoplanets accrete more material and grow into full-sized planets.” – Lisa Grossman; Saving the Earth With Dynamical Simulations; Science News (Washington, DC); Jan 8, 2010.
Explore “accrete” in the Visual Thesaurus.
http://visualthesaurus.com/?w1=accrete
misogyny
PRONUNCIATION: (mi-SOJ-uh-nee)
http://wordsmith.org/words/misogyny.mp3
MEANING: (noun), Hatred of women.
NOTES: The opposite of misogyny is philogyny and its male counterpart misandry. An equal opportunity hater would be misanthrope.
ETYMOLOGY: From Greek miso- (hate) + gyne (woman).
USAGE: “This event [the Montreal massacre of 1989] has, of course, come to mean something more than the horrific killing of 14 female engineering students at Montreal’s L’École Polytechnique by disturbed gunman Marc Lépine, who said before killing them and eventually himself that he hated ‘all feminists’. A ritual observance of the event every year on its anniversary, Dec. 6, enshrines it as our most potent symbol of misogyny and male violence against women.” – Judith Timson; Let’s Stop This Talk of Cowards; The Globe and Mail (Toronto, Canada); Apr 7, 2009.