Today in History (April 8th):
563 B.C.: Gautama Buddha, the founder of Buddhism, was believed to have lived in India from 563 B.C. to 483 B.C.
1726: Birthdays: Lewis Morris, a signer of the Declaration of Independence.
1742: Handel’s “Messiah” was performed for the first time, in Dublin.
1869: Birthdays: Pioneer neurosurgeon Harvey Cushing.
1892: Birthdays: Actor Mary Pickford.
1912: Birthdays: Olympic figure skater/actor Sonja Henie.
1913: 17th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution was adopted. Under it, direct election of U.S. senators became law.
1917: Austria-Hungary, an ally of Germany, severed diplomatic relations with the United States.
1918: Birthdays: Former first lady Betty Ford.
1926: Birthdays: Comedian Shecky Greene.
1929: Birthdays: Composer Jacques Brel.
1931: Birthdays: Actor and former ambassador to Mexico John Gavin.
1935: The U.S. Congress approved the Works Progress Administration, a central part of U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal.
1937: Birthdays: Journalist Seymour Hersh.
1938: Birthdays: Former U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan.
1940: Birthdays: Basketball Hall of Fame member John Havlicek.
1943: Birthdays: Choreographer Michael Bennett of A Chorus Line fame.
1946: Birthdays: Baseball Hall of Fame member Jim Catfish Hunter.
1947: Birthdays: Rock musician Steve Howe.
1952: U.S. President Harry Truman ordered government seizure of the steel industry to avoid a general strike.
1954: Birthdays: Baseball Hall of Fame member Gary Carter.
1955: Birthdays: Novelist Barbara Kingsolver.
1960: The U.S. Senate passed the landmark Civil Rights Bill. Birthdays: Actor/singer John Schneider.
1963: Birthdays: Musician Julian Lennon.
1966: Birthdays: Actor Robin Wright.
1968: Birthdays: Actor Patricia Arquette.
1974: Hank Aaron hit his 715th home run, breaking Babe Ruth’s long-standing career record. Aaron played two more seasons, ending with 755 home runs.
1984: Birthdays: Actor Taran Noah Smith.
1990: Ryan White, who put the face of a child on AIDS, died of complications from the ailment at age 18.
1992: Former tennis great Arthur Ashe confirmed he had AIDS. He said he contracted the disease from a blood transfusion.
1993: Marian Anderson, the first African-American singer to appear at New York’s Metropolitan Opera, died at age 91.
1994: Nirvana lead singer Kurt Cobain, 27, was found dead in his Seattle home of a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head.
1995: In his book In Retrospect: The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam, former Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara wrote that he and other U.S. leaders had been wrong, terribly wrong about the war.
2004: U.S. national security adviser Condoleezza Rice told the 9/11 Commission that a report about a possible plane hijacking received by the White House one month before terrorists struck New York and Washington contained mostly historical information and made no specific warning about a U.S. attack.
2005: About 250,000 mourners attended a 3-hour funeral mass for Pope John Paul II in Rome’s St. Peter’s Square while about 1 million others gathered nearby. Among those in attendance were U.S. President George W. Bush and about 100 other world leaders. Eric Rudolph agreed to plead guilty to four bombings, including one at the 1966 Olympics in Atlanta, to escape the death penalty.
2009: U.S. President Barack Obama concluded an eight-day trip abroad, meeting with world leaders from London to Baghdad, taking part in sessions involving the Group of 20, NATO, the European Union and others, going face-to-face with heads of Russia and China and seeking to build alliances on Afghanistan and other issues.
2010: U.S. President Barack Obama and Russian President Dmitry Medvedev signed an arms reduction pact that would cut significantly the world’s largest nuclear arsenals.
2011: With less than 2 hours to spare, U.S. President Barack Obama and Congressional leaders reached agreement on a federal budget, narrowly averting a government shutdown.
2012: A church in Makurdi, Nigeria collapsed during Easter mass, killing 22 people. U.S. politician Newt Gingrich said, The primary goal of the entire Republican Party has to be to defeat Barack Obama.
Quotes
“The world, we are told, was made especially for man — a presumption not supported by all the facts… Why should man value himself as more than a small part of the one great unit of creation?” – John Muir, naturalist and explorer (1838-1914)
“If you are patient in one moment of anger, you will escape a hundred days of sorrow.” – Chinese proverb
“The power of imagination makes us infinite.” – John Muir, 1838-1914
“Failures to heroic minds are the stepping stones to success.” – Thomas Chandler Haliburton, 1796-1865
“The great blessings of mankind are within us and within our reach; but we shut our eyes, and like people in the dark, we fall foul upon the very thing we search for, without finding it.” – Seneca, 4 B.C.-65 A.D.
“It will not do to investigate the subject of religion too closely, as it is apt to lead to infidelity.” – Abraham Lincoln, 16th US President (1809-1865)
“In youth we feel richer for every new illusion; in maturer years, for every one we lose.” – Madame Anne Sophie Swetchine, mystic (1782-1857)
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Mary Pickford (1893-1979) American Actress:
“Adding sound to movies would be like putting lipstick on the Venus de Milo.”
“If you have made mistakes, there is always another chance for you. You may have a fresh start any moment you choose, for this thing we call ‘failure’ is not the falling down, but the staying down.”
“It would have been more logical if silent pictures had grown out of the talkies instead of the other way around.”
“Supposing you have tried and failed again and again. You may have a fresh start any moment you choose, for this thing we call “failure” is not the falling down, but the staying down.”
“The past cannot be changed. The future is yet in your power.”
“You may have a fresh start any moment you choose, for this thing that we call “failure” is not the falling down, but the staying down.”
svelte
PRONUNCIATION: (SVELT)
MEANING: (adjective), Slim, slender; elegant, graceful.
ETYMOLOGY: French, from Italian svelto, past participle of svellere “to stretch out” devolved from Vulgar Latin *exvellere based on ex- “out” + vellere “to pull.” Where the root of the Latin word comes from is difficult to say. It apparently comes from an underlying *wel- but that root in PIE seems to have been “roll, twist,” not “stretch” or “pull.” If they are related, the root here is akin to German Welle “wave,” walzen “roll,” and English “envelop(e).” This adjective compares the old fashioned way: “svelter” and “sveltest.” The noun is “svelteness” and the adverb, “sveltely,” though we recommend you avoid words this lumpish and ungainly. “Svelte” sounds as sophisticated as its meaning but it has a family of black sheep. The connection it makes between “slender” and “elegant” reflects Western societies bias against the zaftig.
USAGE: “Jean-Anne, you look so svelte in the area covered by your new swim suit!”
hereditament
PRONUNCIATION: (her-i-DIT-uh-ment)
http://wordsmith.org/words/hereditament.mp3
MEANING: (noun), Inheritable property.
ETYMOLOGY: From Latin hereditare (to inherit), from heres (heir). Earliest documented use: 1461.
NOTES: Hereditament is of two kinds: corporeal and incorporeal. If your grandfather willed you his collection of Superman comics, that would be corporeal hereditament. If he awarded you only the right to read those comics from time to time, it’d be incorporeal hereditament.
USAGE:
“The Panadura Recreation Club was established seventy years ago on a hereditament of land.” – Indoor Badminton Court; Ceylon Daily News (Sri Lanka); Sep 7, 2002.
“Sir, having no disease, nor any taint
Nor old hereditament of sin or shame.”
– Sidney Lanier; Poems of Sidney Lanier; 1916.
Explore “hereditament” in the Visual Thesaurus.
http://visualthesaurus.com/?w1=hereditament
doldrums
PRONUNCIATION: (DOHL-druhmz)
http://wordsmith.org/words/doldrums.mp3
MEANING: noun
1. A state or period of stagnation or slump.
2. A region of the ocean near the equator marked by calms and light variable winds.
ETYMOLOGY: In the olden days when a sail-powered vessel hit a calm region of the ocean, it could be stuck there for days. Sailors called that area the doldrums. The word is from Old English dol (dull, stupid), the ending influenced by the word tantrum. Earliest documented use: 1811.
USAGE: “While the US stock market roared ahead, Europe was left in the doldrums.” – Ole Hansen; Commodities Update; Oman Daily Observer; Apr 4, 2012.
Explore “doldrums” in the Visual Thesaurus.
http://visualthesaurus.com/?w1=doldrums
chicanery
PRONUNCIATION: (shi-KAY-nuh-ree)
http://wordsmith.org/words/chicanery.mp3
MEANING: (noun), Deception by trickery or sophistry.
ETYMOLOGY: From French chicaner (to quibble).
USAGE: “Some analysts are claiming that these arrests [of Taliban members] are not good news at all, but merely evidence of still more too-clever-by-half chicanery by Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence.” – Good News From Pakistan, And That’s No Conspiracy; The Gazette (Montreal, Canada); Feb 24, 2010.
Explore “chicanery” in the Visual Thesaurus.
http://visualthesaurus.com/?w1=chicanery
Cadmean victory
PRONUNCIATION: (kad-MEE-uhn VIK-tuh-ree)
http://wordsmith.org/words/cadmean_victory.mp3
MEANING: (noun), A victory won at as great a cost to the victor as to the vanquished.
ETYMOLOGY: After Cadmus, a Phoenician prince in Greek mythology who introduced writing to the Greeks and founded the city of Thebes. Near the site where Cadmus was to build Thebes he encountered a dragon. Even though he managed to kill the dragon, only five of his comrades survived, with whom he founded the city. Other words coined after him are calamine (a pink powder used in skin lotions), from Latin calamina, from Greek kadmeia ge (Cadmean earth) and the name of the chemical element cadmium. A similar eponym is Pyrrhic victory.
USAGE: “In the real world, governed equally by the market and natural economies, humanity is in a final struggle with the rest of life. If it presses on, it will win a Cadmean victory, in which first the biosphere loses, then humanity.” – Edward O. Wilson; The Future of Life; Knopf; 2002.