Today in History (April 5th):
1588: Birthdays: English philosopher Thomas Hobbes.
1614: Pocahontas, daughter of a chief, married English tobacco planter John Rolfe in Jamestown, Va., a marriage that ensured peace between the settlers and the Powhatan Indians for several years.
1621: The Mayflower set sail from Plymouth to return to Great Britain.
1649: Birthdays: Elihu Yale, namesake of Yale University.
1726: Birthdays: Benjamin Harrison, signer of the Declaration of Independence and father of U.S. President William Henry Harrison.
1768: The first U.S. Chamber of Commerce was founded in New York City.
1792: U.S. President George Washington exercised veto power, the first time it was done in the United States.
1827: Birthdays: English physician Joseph Lister, who introduced antiseptic surgery.
1856: Birthdays: Educator Booker T. Washington.
1900: Birthdays: Actor Spencer Tracy.
1901: Birthdays: Actor Melvyn Douglas.
1908: Birthdays: Actor Bette Davis.
1916: Birthdays: Actor Gregory Peck.
1920: Birthdays: Novelist Arthur Hailey.
1922: Birthdays: Singer/actor Gale Storm.
1926: Birthdays: Filmmaker Roger Corman.
1933: Birthdays: Impressionist Frank Gorshin.
1937: Birthdays: Former U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell.
1941: Birthdays: Actor Michael Moriarty.
1943: Birthdays: Actor Max Gail.
1946: Birthdays: Actor Jane Asher.
1949: Birthdays: Astronaut Judith Resnik.
1951: Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were sentenced to death in New York for stealing atomic secrets for the Soviet Union.
1952: Birthdays: Actor Mitch Pileggi.
1968: Violence erupted in several U.S. cities following the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr.
1976: Reclusive billionaire Howard Hughes died of kidney failure during a flight from Acapulco, Mexico, to Houston. He was 71.
1982: The British fleet sailed to recapture the Falkland Islands from Argentina.
1986: Two U.S. servicemen and a Turkish woman were killed in the bombing of a West Berlin disco that Washington blamed on Libya. In retaliation, U.S. jetfighters bombed Tripoli and Benghazi 10 days later.
1991: Former U.S. Sen. John Tower, R-Texas, and 22 others were killed in a commuter plane crash in Brunswick, Ga.
1993: A Salvadoran Boeing 767 jetliner ran off the runway on landing in Guatemala City, Guatemala, and crashed into a residential area. All 213 people aboard the plane survived.
1999: One of two men charged in the October 1998 beating death of gay University of Wyoming student Matthew Shepard pleaded guilty and was sentenced to two life-in-prison sentences. Libya handed over for trial two suspects in the 1988 bombing of Pan Am Flight 103. The men were tried in the Netherlands under Scottish law.
2003: Members of the U.S. 3rd Infantry moved through southwest Baghdad and reached the center of the Iraqi capital.
2005: ABC News anchor Peter Jennings told colleagues and friends that he had lung cancer.
2007: Iran released the 15-member British naval crew seized in the Persian Gulf and held for 13 days. Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who accused the Britons of trespassing in Iranian waters, said their pardons were a gift to the British.
2009: North Korea failed to put a rocket into orbit, contrary to its earlier claim of a successful launch, U.S. and South Korean officials said. The payload reportedly fell into the Pacific Ocean, along with the second stage of the rocket.
2010: In China, rescuers pulled 115 miners from a flooded coal mine where they had been trapped for eight days. In West Virginia, 29 people died in an explosion at a coal mine about 30 miles south of Charleston. The Obama administration announced a revised U.S. defense strategy including a commitment not to use nuclear weapons against most non-nuclear nations.
2011: Southwest Airlines said cracks were found on two of its Boeing 737s, bringing the total to five since one of its jetliners developed a gaping hole in the roof during flight.
2012: U.S. President Barack Obama signed a bipartisan bill he called a potential game-changer for start-ups and small businesses. He said the new law would make it easier for business owners to take their companies public and would remove certain regulatory investment barriers.
Quotes
“If you judge people, you have no time to love them.” – Mother Teresa
“An individual human existence should be like a river: small at first, narrowly contained within its banks, and rushing passionately past rocks and over waterfalls. Gradually the river grows wider, the banks recede, the waters flow more quietly, and in the end, without any visible break, they become merged in the sea, and painlessly lose their individual being.” – Bertrand Russell, philosopher, mathematician, author, Nobel laureate (1872-1970)
“Those who cannot forgive others break the bridge over which they themselves must pass.” – Confucius, philosopher and teacher (c. 551-478 BCE)
“The nuclear arms race is like two sworn enemies standing waist deep in gasoline, one with three matches, the other with five.” – Carl Sagan, astronomer and writer (1934-1996)
“Some men of a secluded and studious life have sent forth from their closet or their cloister, rays of intellectual light that have agitated courts and revolutionized kingdoms; like the moon which, though far removed from the ocean, and shining upon it with a serene and sober light, is the chief cause of all those ebbings and flowings which incessantly disturb that restless world of waters.” – Charles Caleb Colton, author and clergyman (1780-1832)
Booker T. Washington (1856-1915) American educator:
“Associate yourself with people of good quality, for it is better to be alone than in bad company.”
“Character is power.”
“Character, not circumstances, makes the man.”
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“Few things can help an individual more than to place responsibility on him, and to let him know that you trust him.”
“I have learned that success is to be measured not so much by the position that one has reached in life as by the obstacles which he has had to overcome while trying to succeed.”
“I let no man drag me down so low as to make me hate him.”
“I will permit no man to narrow and degrade my soul by making me hate him.”
“No man, who continues to add something to the material, intellectual and moral well-being of the place in which he lives, is left long without proper reward.”
“Nothing ever comes to one, that is worth having, except as a result of hard work.”
volte-face
PRONUNCIATION: (volt-FAHS)
http://wordsmith.org/words/volte-face.mp3
MEANING: noun: A reversal in policy or opinion; about-face.
ETYMOLOGY: From French, from Italian voltafaccia, from voltare (to turn), from Vulgar Latin volvitare, frequentative of Latin volvere (to turn) + faccia (face). Earliest documented use: 1819.
USAGE:
“The possibility of a flotation was a remarkable volte-face for Standard Life.” – Carmel Crimmins; Standard Life Pays Its Former Chief More Than £1m; Irish Examiner (Cork, Ireland); Mar 1, 2004.
“Not too long after the panels indicted the former Senate President, the Senate made a volte-face on its action, dumped the documents, and cleared those indicted of any wrongdoing!” – Senate and Unending Bribery Scandals; Daily Times (Lagos, Nigeria); Feb 19, 2004.
Explore “volte-face” in the Visual Thesaurus.
http://visualthesaurus.com/?w1=volte-face
Mayday or mayday
PRONUNCIATION: (MAY-day)
http://wordsmith.org/words/mayday.mp3
MEANING: noun: A distress signal; a call for help.
ETYMOLOGY: Mayday is an international radio distress signal used by ships and aircraftto call for help. It’s a phonetic respelling of French m’aidez (help me), from me (me) + aidez, imperative of aider (to help). Earliest documented use: 1927.
USAGE:
“Auckland Westpac Rescue Helicopter flew to the aid of a yachtsman who made a mayday call this morning off the coast of Raglan.” – Abby Gillies; Rescue Services Kept Busy; The New Zealand Herald (Auckland); Mar 3, 2012.
“Rooms [at Hotel Bel-Air are] so high-tech I felt like a 747 pilot. Helpful techies arrived promptly no matter how often I radioed Mayday.” – Mr. Incognito Goes To Tinseltown; Condé Nast’s Traveler (New York); Feb 2012.
Explore “mayday” in the Visual Thesaurus.
http://visualthesaurus.com/?w1=Mayday
limen
PRONUNCIATION: (LY-muhn)
http://wordsmith.org/words/limen.mp3
MEANING: (noun), A threshold of response: point at which a stimulus is of sufficient intensity to generate a response.
ETYMOLOGY: From Latin limen (threshold).
USAGE: “Such to the dead might appear the world of living — charged with information, with meaning, yet somehow always just, terribly, beyond that fateful limen where any lamp of comprehension might beam forth.” – Thomas Pynchon; Against the Day; Penguin Press; 2006.
Explore “limen” in the Visual Thesaurus.
http://visualthesaurus.com/?w1=limen
‘Canceled’ or ‘Cancelled’?
Q: Is it proper to use “canceled” or “cancelled”? –Barry Zadworny, Robbinsville, N.J.
A: This very question almost led to a feud in my own family. Many years ago, my mom decided to cancel a yard sale that we had already advertised in the newspaper. So my sister Pam made a large sign to put in front of the house. It read, “Yard Sale Canceled.”
When I suggested the last word should be spelled “cancelled,” Pam stuck to her guns. She was right. (I still keep that sign in my cellar to remind me of my smarty-pants arrogance.)
Here’s the rule that she knew and I didn’t: When adding a suffix beginning with a vowel to a two-syllable verb ending in a single consonant, double the consonant only if the accent falls on the last syllable of the verb.
So, because “conTROL,” “forGET” and “beGIN,” for instance, are stressed on the second syllable, they become “controlled,” “forgettable” and “beginning,” respectively.
But if the accent falls on the first syllable of the two-syllable verb, don’t double the consonant. Thus “CANcel,” “FILter” and “TRAVel” become “canceled,” “filterable” and “traveled,” respectively.
And, yes, I realize the Brits double the consonants regardless of the accent. They also probably call yard sales “Estate Depossessions.”
Q: I notice writers using the phrase “more important,” as in, “More important, his writing skills are just what we’re looking for,” when I thought they should have written “more importantly.” Can you clarify this? –Mike Burke, Andover, Conn.
A: Glad to. Either “more important” or “more importantly” is correct. Traditionally, grammarians have insisted on “more important,” which they construe as a shortened form of “What is more important.” But, as Bryan Garner points out in “Modern American Usage,” this edict is silly for two reasons:
1. No one objects to the sentence-modifying adverb “importantly” (as in, “Importantly, this is a grass-roots movement”), so why prohibit “more importantly”?
2. We use the adverb form for similar modifiers, as in “More notably, he hit two homeruns,” or “More interestingly, they were inside-the-park homeruns.” We wouldn’t use “more notable” or “more interesting” in either sentence.
Most importantly, until a couple of years ago, I — always the smarty-pants — was one of those traditionalists who vigorously flailed “most importantly.”
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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