Today in History (November 30th):
1508: Birthdays: Italian Renaissance architect Andrea Palladio.
1667: Birthdays: Irish satirist Jonathan Swift.
1731: A series of earthquakes struck China. More than 100,000 people died.
1782: Preliminary peace articles formally ending the American Revolutionary War were signed in Paris.
1835: Birthdays: Novelist Mark Twain (Samuel Langhorne Clemens).
1874: Birthdays: British statesman Winston Churchill.
1912: Birthdays: Film director Gordon Parks.
1913: Charles Chaplin made his screen debut in Mack Sennett’s short film Making a Living.
1918: Birthdays: Actor Efrem Zimbalist Jr.
1920: Birthdays: Actor Virginia Mayo.
1924: Birthdays: Shirley Chisholm, the first black woman elected to Congress; Comedian Allan Sherman.
1926: Birthdays: Actor Richard Crenna.
1927: Birthdays: Actor Robert Guillaume.
1929: Birthdays: Producer/TV music show host Dick Clark.
1930: Birthdays: Watergate figure G. Gordon Liddy.
1936: Birthdays: 1960s radical Abbie Hoffman.
1937: Birthdays: Filmmaker Ridley Scott.
1939: The Russo-Finnish War started after the Soviet Union failed to obtain territorial concessions from Finland.
1947: Birthdays: Playwright David Mamet.
1952: Birthdays: Singer/actor Mandy Patinkin.
1953: Birthdays: Singer June Pointer.
1955: Birthdays: Rock singer Billy Idol; Historian Michael Beschloss.
1962: Birthdays: Heisman Trophy winner Bo Jackson.
1965: Birthdays: Actor Ben Stiller.
1975: Israel pulled its forces out of a 93-mile-long corridor along the Gulf of Suez as part of an interim peace agreement with Egypt.
1978: Birthdays: Singer Clay Aiken.
1988: The Soviet Union stopped jamming broadcasts of Radio Free Europe for the first time in 30 years.
1989: Rebels launched a fifth major coup attempt against Philippine President Corazon Aquino. Czechoslovakia announced an end to travel restrictions and said it planned to dismantle some of the fortifications along the Austrian border.
2003: The World Health Organization unveiled a historic plan to treat 3 million impoverished AIDS sufferers by the end of 2005.
2004: Flash floods and landslides killed more than 300 people in the storm-swept Philippines. Ken Jennings lost on the game show Jeopardy! after winning 74 games and $2.5 million.
2005: The world’s first partial-face transplant was conducted in France where a woman was given a new nose, lips and chin following a brutal dog bite.
2006: The international committee of the Red Cross said civilians were dying in the Iraq war at an average of more than 100 a day.
2007: An AtlasJet Airlines plane traveling from Istanbul, to Isparta, Turkey, crashed near the Isparta airport, killing all 56 people on board. Police arrested a man who claimed to have a bomb and took several people hostage at the presidential campaign office of Hillary Clinton in Rochester, N.H. No one was injured in the almost six-hour ordeal.
2008: Officials said the owners of a Ukrainian arms ship hijacked off Somalia more than two months previously agreed to pirates’ $20 million ransom demand.
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2010: A second U.S. district judge ruled the mandate to buy health insurance, a key provision in new federal healthcare reform legislation, is constitutional. Mexico is quickly becoming the world’s leading source of the illicit drug methamphetamine, U.S. law enforcement officials report.
2011: Wall Street closed November with a surge as the Dow Jones industrial average turned in its biggest one-day gain in 32 months — 490.06 points — triggered by coordinated efforts of the U.S. Federal Reserve and five other banks to add liquidity to financial markets and ease the strain imposed by the ongoing debt crisis in Europe. A record seizure of more than 32 tons of marijuana was found in a 625-yard tunnel linking warehouses in Mexico and California. U.S. authorities said the elaborate tunnel was equipped with an elevator and an electric rail system.
Quotes
“I never saw, heard, nor read that the clergy were beloved in any nation where Christianity was the religion of the country. Nothing can render them popular but some degree of persecution.” – Jonathan Swift, Irish satirist
Revere
PRONUNCIATION: (reh-VEER)
MEANING: (verb), To venerate, to hold in deep, religious respect.
ETYMOLOGY: French reverer from Latin revereri based on re- “back” + vereri “to fear.” The Proto-Indian-European root underlying this stem is *wer- “look out for” and it entered English as “wary, ” “aware,” and the older ward “watchman, warden” and “steward,” people who look out for others. “Ward” was borrowed by Old French, which had no [w] sound, so modified it to “guard,” a word which was then promptly borrowed back into English with a slightly different meaning and pronunciationanother excellent example of lexical ping-pong.
USAGE: “Warren Buffet is an investment manager revered by investors throughout the country.”
tmesis
PRONUNCIATION: (tuh-MEE-sis, TMEE-sis)
http://wordsmith.org/words/tmesis.mp3
MEANING: noun: Stuffing a word into the middle of another word. Examples: a-whole-nother, abso-bloody-lutely.
ETYMOLOGY: From Greek tmesis (a cutting), from temnein (to cut). Ultimately from the Indo-European root tem- (to cut), which is also the source of tonsure, temple, contemplate, epitome, tome, anatomy, and atomy. First recorded use: 1586.
USAGE: “I don’t like tmesis; it’s abso-bloody-lutely ri-flipping-diculous.” – Gazza’s Decline is a Sad Waste of Talent; Daily Star (London, UK); Oct 25, 2010.
Explore “tmesis” in the Visual Thesaurus.
http://visualthesaurus.com/?w1=tmesis
hegemony
PRONUNCIATION: (hi-JEM-uh-nee, HEJ-uh-moh-nee)
|http://wordsmith.org/words/hegemony.mp3
MEANING: noun: Predominance over others, especially of a country over other countries.
ETYMOLOGY: From Greek hegemonia (leadership), from hegemon (leader), from hegeisthai (to lead). Ultimately from the Indo-European root sag- (to seek out), which is also the source of seek, ransack, ramshackle, and forsake. Earliest documented use: 1567.
USAGE: US hegemony is declining — the era of overbearing US power is coming to an end.” – End Looks Near for American Hegemony; New Straits Times (Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia); Nov 10, 2009.
Explore “hegemony” in the Visual Thesaurus.
http://visualthesaurus.com/?w1=hegemony
Is Language ‘Litter’-ally Going to the Dogs?
Woof! Woof! Here’s a whole kennel of pet peeves sent by readers:
When Dan of Sioux Falls, S.D., hears people use “literally” to mean “figuratively,” he literally has a heart attack. Well, not literally. “I am literally shocked at the number of meaningless iterations of the term,” he writes.
Emailer Mark Metersky dislikes the frequent use of the singular “there’s” when the plural “there are” is required, as in, “There’s many good candidates for Congress.” Mark writes, “Now everybody does it, and it has the same effect on me as fingers on a chalkboard.” Eeeek!
Ruth Edwards of Simsbury, Conn., reprises her complaint about newscasters’ mispronunciation of “reprise” (meaning “to repeat”) as “rih-PRYSE” instead of “rih-PREEZ.” “And yes, I have written to the TV stations,” she writes, “and yes, I yell at the TV.”
Speaking of TV, Rosemary of Greensburg, Pa., says newscasters do a number on numbers by inserting an unnecessary “and” into figures of three or more digits, e.g., “two thousand and twelve” and “one hundred and fifty.”
Carol Greenfield and Ralph Sweet of Enfield, Conn. team up to complain about newscasters’ mispronunciations of “Iowa” and “Florida” as two-syllable words, e.g., “EYE-wah” and “FLOOR-da.”
Elizabeth Ryan of Pittsburgh, Pa., gets riled up when she sees “myself” used in place of “me” or “I,” e.g., “Please give it to Tom or myself”; “Tom and myself are going to the store.” “I don’t think grammar is being taught anymore,” she writes. Myself, I agree.
Jeff Bartolino of Hopewell Township, N.J., who works in the claims department of an insurance company, says he’s sick of reading the redundant phrase “prior medical history.” “What’s wrong,” he asks, “with a patient’s ‘medical history’ or ‘prior condition’?”
Barbara Rogers of St. Paul, Minn., is fed up with sentences that begin, “The problem is, is that …” She explains, “One could legitimately say ‘WHAT the problem is is that …’ because ‘What’ is the subject of the second ‘is,’ but without ‘What’ there’s no reason for the second ‘is.'”
Finally, like the final bursts in a fireworks display, emailer Phil Dansdill unleashes a rapid explosion of peeves: “graduate high school” for “graduate from high school”; “all the sudden” for “all of a sudden”; “expecially” for “especially”; and “off of” for “off.” And, no, he’s not off of … er, off his rocker.