Today in History (July 20th)
356 B.C.: Birthdays: Macedonian leader Alexander the Great.
1822: Birthdays: Austrian monk and pioneering botanist Gregor Johann Mendel.
1859: American baseball fans were charged an admission fee for the first time. About 1,500 spectators each paid 50 cents to see Brooklyn play New York.
1881: Five years after U.S. Army Gen. George A. Custer’s defeat at the Battle of Little Bighorn, Sioux leader Sitting Bull surrendered to the army, which promised amnesty for him and his followers.
1919: Birthdays: New Zealand explorer Edmund Hillary, who in 1953 reached the summit of Mount Everest.
1920: Birthdays: Elliot Richardson, attorney general under U.S. President Richard Nixon.
1930: Birthdays: Actor Sally Ann Howes.
1933: Birthdays: Author Cormac McCarthy.
1936: Birthdays: U.S. Sen. Barbara Mikulski, D-Md., the longest serving woman in U.S. Congress history.
1938: Birthdays: Actor Diana Rigg; Actor Natalie Wood.
1940: Billboard magazine published its first Music Popularity Chart, topped by I’ll Never Smile Again by the Tommy Dorsey orchestra with Frank Sinatra.
1945: The U.S. flag was raised over Berlin as the first American troops moved in to take part in the post-World War II occupation. Birthdays: Singer Kim Carnes.
1947: Birthdays: Guitarist Carlos Santana.
1948: President Truman issued the first peacetime military draft in the United States.
1951: While entering a mosque in the Jordanian sector of east Jerusalem, King Abdullah of Jordan was assassinated by a Palestinian nationalist.
1957: Birthdays: Actor Donna Dixon.
1968: The first Special Olympics Games were contested at Soldier Field in Chicago.
1969: U.S. astronauts Neil Armstrong and Edwin Buzz Aldrin became the first men to set foot on the moon.
1971: Birthdays: Actor Sandra Oh.
1973: Birthdays: Actor Omar Epps.
1976: The Viking 1 lander, an unmanned U.S. planetary probe, became the first spacecraft to successfully land on the surface of Mars.
1985: Treasure hunter Mel Fisher located a Spanish galleon sunk by a 1622 hurricane off Key West, Fla. It contained $400 million worth of treasure.
1989: U.S. President George H.W. Bush called for the United States to organize a long-range space program to support an orbiting space station, a moon base and a manned mission to Mars.
1993: White House Deputy Counsel Vincent Foster was found shot to death in a park in northern Virginia. His death was ruled a suicide.
2005: The U.S. Justice Department activated its online National Sex Offender Public Registry, linking the registries of 22 states.
2006: U.S. President George W. Bush received a kind reception and applause from the NAACP in his first address to the nation’s oldest civil rights organization as president. He had turned down five previous invitations to speak.
2009: Violent crime rates unexpectedly plunged in major cities across the United States, officials said. Washington. New York and Los Angeles led the pack, approaching 40-year homicide lows.
2011: International Tribunal officials announced the arrest of Goran Hadzic, the last Serbian leader wanted for war crimes.
2012: A gunman set off tear gas grenades and opened fire at a midnight screening of The Dark Knight Rises at a theater in Aurora, Colo., killing 12 people and wounding 58. The accused killer, James E. Holmes, later pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity.
Quotes
“Brevity is the soul of wit.” – Shakespeare (Hamlet)
“Brevity is the soul of lingerie.” – Dorothy Parker
“They are happy men whose natures sort with their vocations.” – Francis Bacon, essayist, philosopher, and statesman (1561-1626)
“Every sin is an attempt to fly from emptiness.” – Simone Weil, philosopher, mystic, activist (1909-1943)
“There are many causes that I am prepared to die for but no causes that I am prepared to kill for.” – Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi (1869-1948)
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“Five enemies of peace inhabit with us – avarice, ambition, envy, anger, and pride; if these were to be banished, we should infallibly enjoy perpetual peace.”
“How difficult it is to save the bark of reputation from the rocks of ignorance.”
“It is more honorable to be raised to a throne than to be born to one. Fortune bestows the one, merit obtains the other.”
“Man has no greater enemy than himself.”
“Sameness is the mother of disgust, variety the cure.”
“Suspicion is the cancer of friendship.”
“To be able to say how much love, is love but little.”
“Who naught suspects is easily deceived.”
wunderkind
http://wordsmith.org/words/wunderkind.mp3
PRONUNCIATION: (VOON-duhr-kint) plural wunderkinder (-kin-duhr)
MEANING: (noun)
1. A child prodigy.
2. One who achieves great success or acclaim at an early age.
ETYMOLOGY: Origin: 1890-95; < German, equivalent to Wunder wonder + Kind child USAGE: "When he was well into his 40's, his wunderkind days far behind him, Jason had to wonder whether he had spent all these years resting on his laurels or whether he had actually peaked incredibly early."
nebbish
PRONUNCIATION: (NEB-ish)
http://wordsmith.org/words/nebbish.mp3
MEANING: (noun), A pitifully timid or ineffectual person.
ETYMOLOGY: From Yiddish nebekh (poor, unfortunate), of Slavic origin. Ultimately from the Indo-European root bhag- (to share) that is also the source of baksheesh, Sanskrit bhagya (good fortune), and words related to -phagy (eating), such as onychophagia and xerophagy.
USAGE: “Nebbish son-in-law Lando must stand up to his shrewish wife Tiffany.” – David Schmeichel; Greed is Good at Celebrations; Winnipeg Sun (Canada); Apr 4, 2007.
Explore “nebbish” in the Visual Thesaurus
http://visualthesaurus.com/?w1=nebbish
assiduous
PRONUNCIATION: (uh-SIJ-oo-uhs)
http://wordsmith.org/words/assiduous.mp3
MEANING: (adjective), Constant; persistent; industrious.
ETYMOLOGY: From Latin assiduus, from assidere (to attend to, to sit down to), from ad- (toward) + sedere (to sit). Ultimately from the Indo-European root sed- (to sit) that is also the source of sit, chair, saddle, assess, sediment, soot, cathedral, and tetrahedron.
USAGE: “The reason for his presence there [a Donald Duck statue in a temple garden] remains a mystery despite the author’s most assiduous inquiries.” – Jeff Kingston; Chiang Mai: Thailand’s beguiling Rose of the North; The Japan Times (Tokyo); Jun 28, 2009.
grammatolatry
PRONUNCIATION: (gram-uh-TOL-uh-tree)
http://wordsmith.org/words/grammatolatry.mp3
MEANING: (noun), The worship of words: regard for the letter while ignoring the spirit of something.
ETYMOLOGY: From Greek gramma (letter) + -latry (worship).
USAGE: “The worship of words is more pernicious than the worship of images. Grammatolatry is the worst species of idolatry.” – Robert Dale Owen; The Debatable Land Between This World And the Next; Trubner and Co; 1871.