Word Daze: The Word Lover's Almanac

July 19: Push the Envelope Day

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Thu, 20 Jul 2017 03:04:00 +0000

Today is the anniversary of the first true space flight in 1962. Air Force pilot Bob White took the experimental aircraft the X-15 to a record altitude of 314,750 feet, pushing the envelope and breaking the 50-mile boundary separating the Earth’s atmosphere and outer space. READ MORE

September 16: Eponymous Law Day

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September 15: Opposing Argument Day

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September 14: Anthem Day

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September 13: Literary Hoax Day

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September 12: Croissants and Cappuccino Day

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September 11: Motivational Movie Monologue Day

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September 10: Notorious Eponym Day

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September 9: State Motto Day

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September 8: International Literacy Day

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September 7: Words Chiseled in Granite Day

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NEW LOCATION - NEW CONTENT

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Wed, 02 Sep 2015 18:12:00 +0000

Go to

www.worddays.net

for up-to-date posts

July 1: Strunk and White Day

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Mon, 01 Jul 2013 07:30:00 +0000

July 1: Strunk and White Day

Today is the birthday of William Strunk, Jr.(1869-1946), the principal author of The Elements of Style. This book, also known as Strunk and White, is without a doubt one of the most influential style guides of all time, selling over ten million copies. Strunk originally published the book as an instructional pamphlet for his students at Cornell University in 1918. The book gained its great notoriety after it was revised and published by Strunk’s former student E. B. White in 1959.

The 11 Principles of Composition below are just a sample of the advice for writers found in The Elements of Style.

1. Choose a suitable design and stick to it.

2. Make the paragraph the unit of composition.

3. Use the active voice.

4. Put statements in positive form.

5. Use definite, specific, concrete language.

6. Omit needless words.

7. Avoid a succession of loose sentences.

8. Express coordinate ideas in similar form.

9. Keep related words together.

10. In summaries, keep to one tense.

11. Place the emphatic words of a sentence at the end.

Assignment 1: Select one of the principles in the list above and explain why it is either good advice or bad advice for writers.

Assignment 2: What is your single most important Principle of Composition? In other words what do you think is the most important piece of advice that a writer can follow? State your advice as a rule; then, explain it in detail with showing examples where appropriate.

Quote of the Day: Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts. This requires not that the writer make all his sentences short, or that he avoid all detail and treat his subjects only in outline, but that every word tell. –William Strunk, Jr.

June 30: One Book Author Day

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Sun, 30 Jun 2013 07:30:00 +0000

On this date in 1936, the novel Gone with the Wind was published by Margaret Mitchell. The website Goodreads has a list of over 60 authors who wrote a single novel. Notable titles include To Kill a Mockingbird and The Catcher in the Rye.

For a fascinating examination of this topic, check out the documentary The Stone Reader. The film traces one man's quest to find one book author Dow Mossman who published The Stones of Summer in 1976.

Today's Quote: After all, tomorrow is another day. --Last line of Gone with the Wind

June 29: Blended Words Day

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Sat, 29 Jun 2013 18:57:00 +0000

On this date in 1995, Diane White, writing in The Boston Globe, coined the blended word bridezilla (bride + Godzilla) to describe "brides who are particularly difficult and obnoxious." White's neologism follows a trend that began in the 20th century of combining two words to form a single new word. Blends are also called portmanteau words, portmanteau being the French term for a suitcase with two compartments.

June 27: The Lottery Day

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Thu, 27 Jun 2013 07:30:00 +0000

The short story "The Lottery" by Shirley Jackson takes place on June 27th. The story was published in the New Yorker on June 26, 1948.

June 27th on the Roman calendar is Initium Aestasis, the beginning of summer.

Listen to the story and a brief discussion of the story on the New Yorker Podcast.

Or watch a brief film version:

William Brennan, a writer for Slate's culture blog provides some insights on Jackson's writing process.

Today's Challenge: Today in Fiction
If you were to write a story set on a single day, what specific date would you choose? Why?

Quote of the Day: I frankly confess to being completely baffled by Shirley Jackson’s ‘The Lottery.’ Will you please send us a brief explanation before my husband and I scratch right through our scalps trying to fathom it? --Miriam Friend in a letter to the editor of The New Yorker.

June 26: Personal Pronoun Day

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Wed, 26 Jun 2013 07:30:00 +0000

On this date in 1963, John Lennon and Paul McCartney began composing the song "She Loves You." They began on their tour bus, continued work in their hotel room in Newcastle, and finished the following day at the home of Paul's father in Liverpool.

When they finished the song, John and Paul played it for Paul's father Jim McCartney. His response was: "That's very nice son, but there's enough of these Americanisms around. Couldn't you sing 'She loves you, yes, yes, yes!'?" (1).

In his biography of Paul McCartney entitled Many Years From Now, Barry Miles quotes Paul, discussing the song's grammar:

"It was again a she, you, me, I, personal preposition song. I suppose the most interesting thing about it was that it was a message song, it was someone bringing a message. It wasn't us any more, it was moving off the 'I love you, girl' or 'Love me do', it was a third person, which was a shift away. 'I saw her, and she said to me, to tell you, that she loves you, so there's a little distance we managed to put in it which was quite interesting."

Of course, Paul should have said personal pronoun, not preposition.

For more on the Beatles and Pronouns, check out the following article: I Me Mine: The Beatles and Their Pronouns.

When it comes to rock songs and pronouns, who can forget the Grammar Rock Pronoun song? It tells just about everything you need to know about pronouns and why we use them:

Today's Challenge: The Beatles Pronoun Challenge
Can you name twenty titles of Beatles songs that contain at least one pronoun? For extra-credit include some that have more than one. True Beatles fans should be able to identify one song title consisting entirely of pronouns.

Quote of the Day: I am he as you are he as you are me and we are all together. --Lyrics from I Am the Walrus

Sources:
1 - http://www.beatlesbible.com/songs/she-loves-you/

Sample Titles: I Me Mine, From Me to You, I Saw Her Standing There, I Want to Hold Your Hand

June 25: George Orwell Day

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Tue, 25 Jun 2013 07:30:00 +0000

Today is the birthday of British journalist, essayist, and novelist George Orwell (1903-1950). His birth name was Eric Arthur Blair, and he was born in Motihari, India, where his father was serving as an official in the British colonial government. Orwell left India to get his education in British schools, but he returned to Asia in 1922 to work with the Indian Imperial Police in Burma. He decided to devote himself to writing full time in 1928, and in 1933 he published his first novel Down and Out in Paris and London and adopted his pen name, George Orwell.

Orwell's best known and most widely read novels are Animal Farm and 1984. Both novels are potent warnings against big government, totalitarianism, and fascism.

In Animal Farm, a political allegory, Mr. Jones' animals take over his farm, and in events that parallel the Russian Revolution, they learn that "All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others."

Nineteen Eighty-Four tells the story of a future dystopia called Oceania. The one-party government is in a perpetual state of war and is led by the all-seeing but unseen leader called Big Brother. From the very beginning of the book, the novel's main character, a party work named Winston Smith, is doing something that is both radical and unlawful: he is questioning his government, and he is writing his thoughts in a journal.

Orwell wrote 1984 in 1948 (reversing the numbers 4 and 8), but he probably should have called it 2084 since questions about big government, privacy, and the role of technology make this novel even more relevant in the 21st century than it was in the 20th.

Two words created by Orwell in 1984, doublethink and newspeak have been melded in our modern lexicon to become doublespeak, meaning language that is deliberately constructed to disguise rather than clarify meaning. William Lunz, author of the 1989 book Doublespeak, keeps Orwell's memory alive in his annual Doublespeak Awards, which call attention to language from government, business, and the military that is "grossly deceptive, evasive and euphemistic."

Orwell's use of the suffix -speak in 1984, for words such as newspeak, duckspeak, and oldspeak, popularized the use of the suffix -speak to refer to any particular variety of spoken English, such as Haigspeak, Bushspeak, or soccer-speak.

The 1946 essay Politics and the English Language is George Orwell's plea for writing that is clear, concise, and thoughtful. In a famous example, he presents the following passage from Ecclesiastes as a model of clarity:

I returned and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all.

He then translates the passage into modern gobbledygook:

Objective considerations of contemporary phenomena compel the conclusion that success or failure in competitive activities exhibits no tendency to be commensurate with innate capacity, but that a considerable element of the unpredictable must invariably be taken into account.

Also in Politics and the English Language, Orwell practices what he preaches when he presents the following concise list of rules for writers:

1. Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.

2. Never use a long word where a short one will do.

3. If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.

4. Never use the passive [voice] where you can use the active.

5. Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.

7. Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.

Today's Challenge: Big Brother Is Not Eschewing Obfuscation
Below are several examples of doublespeak from William Lunz. See if you can wipe the fog off the language window and translate each phrase into its plain English equivalent:

1. genuine imitation leather
2. collateral damage
3. water landing
4. radiation enhancement devices
5. predawn vertical insertion
6. human remains pouches
7. previously thawed poultry
8. involuntarily terminated
9. immediate permanent incapacitation
10. high-velocity, multipurpose air circulators (1)

Quote of the Day: Words—so innocent and powerless as they are, as standing in a dictionary, how potent for good and evil they become, in the hands of one who knows how to combine them. Nathaniel Hawthorne Words—so innocent and powerless as they are, as standing in a dictionary, how potent for good and evil they become, in the hands of one who knows how to combine them. --Nathaniel Hawthorne

Answers: 1. fake leather 2. civilian casualties 3. airplane crash in the ocean 4. nuclear weapons
5. attack by paratroopers 6. body bags 7. frozen chicken 8. fired 9. death 10. electric fan

1 - Lunz, William. Doublespeak. New York: Random House, 1989.

June 24: Devil's Dictionary Day

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Mon, 24 Jun 2013 07:30:00 +0000

Today is the birthday of Ambrose Bierce, American journalist and short-story writer. He was born in Ohio in 1842, and after serving in the Civil War he travelled west. He rose to prominence as a journalist in San Francisco. His best known work of fiction is a short story called An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge, a war story about the last thoughts of man before his execution.

Bierce's best know work though is his Devil's Dictionary, a satirical work featuring definitions that display Bierce's sardonic, piercing wit. Bierce began publishing his definitions as a part of his newspaper column in 1875 and continued until 1906. A complete collection of words and definitions was first published in 1911.

Here are some samples of the definitions:

Bigot: n. One who is obstinately and zealously attached to an opinion that you do not entertain.

Cynic: n. A blackguard whose faulty vision sees things as they are, not as they ought to be. Hence the custom among the Scythians of plucking out a cynic's eyes to improve his vision.

Dictionary: n. A malevolent literary device for cramping the growth of a language and making it hard and inelastic. This dictionary, however, is a most useful work (1).

Today's Challenge: The Devil Made Me Define It
Given the definitions below from Bierces' Devil's Dictionary, see if you can come up with the appropriate word.

1. n. An invention of the devil which abrogates some of the advantages of making a disagreeable person keep his distance.

2. Adj. Able to pick with equal skill a right-hand pocket or a left.

3. n. The salt with which the American humorist spoils his intellectual cookery by leaving it out.

4. n. A temporary insanity curable by marriage . . . .

5. n. One to whom the interests of a part seem superior to those of the whole. The dupe of statesmen and the tool of conquerors.

6. n. A place where the wicked cease from troubling you with talk of their personal affairs, and the good listen with attention while you expound your own.

7. n. A rich thief.

8. n. In international affairs, a period of cheating between two periods of fighting.

9. n. A prestidigitator who, putting metal into your mouth, pulls coins out of your pocket.

10. n. A despot whom the wise ridicule and obey (1).

Quote of the Day: Year, n. A period of three hundred and sixty-five disappointments. --Ambrose Bierce

Answers: 1. telephone 2. ambidextrous 3. wit 4. love 5. patriot 6. heaven 7. kleptomaniac 8. peace 9. dentist 10. fashion

1 - Bierce, Ambrose. The Devil's Dictionary. New York: Dover Publications, Inc., 1993.

June 23: Pangram Day

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Sun, 23 Jun 2013 07:30:00 +0000

Today is the anniversary of the patent for the first QWERTY typewriter.

Around 1860 Christopher Latham Sholes, a journalist for the Milwaukee News, began his quest to create a machine that could write words both legibly and quickly on paper. Sholes' design was not the first attempt at creating a writing machine, but it was the fastest and most efficient model available when he filed for his patent in 1868.

Shoes great innovation was the QWERTY system (named for the arrangement of the first six letters on the first row of letters on the keyboard). As explained in Great Inventions, Sholes' design, coupled with the QWERTY letter arrangement, made his typewriter faster than a pen:

The secret of its speed lay in the keyboard design, which paradoxically slowed the typist down. Sholes arranged the letters in the now familiar qwerty sequence: this forces typists to move their fingers further than was really necessary to type common letter sequences but it gave the keys time to fall back into place after typing (1).

The name type-writer was coined by Sholes, who sold his machine to E. Remington & Sons in 1873. In 1874 the Remington typewriter hit the market at a price of $125. One of the first buyers was Mark Twain who completed the manuscript for The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn on his new machine, becoming the first writer ever to present a publisher with a typed manuscript (2).

Even today, in an era where metal keys have been replaced by electronic word processing, the QWERTY system remains the standard keyboard layout.

Wordplay enthusiasts have an entire category of words related to typewriter order. For example, the word typewriter can be written using just the letters on the top row of the keyboard.

Chris Cole's book Wordplay: A Curious Dictionary of Language Oddities lists the following additional examples:

-Other common words that can be written using just the top row: repertoire, proprietor, perpetuity.

-Longest common word that can be typed using only letters from the middle row: alfalfa.

-Longest common words using letters in typewriter order: weigh, quips, quash, quaff, quill.

-Longest common words using letters in reverse typewriter order: soiree, sirree.

-Longest common words using just the left hand on the typewriter: aftereffects, stewardesses, reverberated, desegregated.

-Longest common words using just the right hand on the typewriter: polyphony, homophony.

-Longest common word using alternating hands: dismantlement.

-Longest common word using one finger: deeded.

-Longest word from adjacent keys: assessed, reseeded (3).

A less esoteric type of typewriter wordplay is called the pangram. Common to students who are learning the keyboard, a pangram is a single sentence that contains all 26 letters of the alphabet at least once, such as: The quick brown fox, jumps over the lazy dogs. A common competition among hardcore word-buffs is to create pangrams with the fewest possible errors. It is possible to create a 26-letter pangram, but it is hard to do without resorting to obscure words and strained syntax; for example, try to decifer this 26-letter pangram: Cwm, fjord-bank glyphs quiz vext.
Here are some other examples of pangrams that use more common words:

How quickly daft jumping zebras vex.

The five boxing wizards jump quickly.

Pack my box with five dozen liquor jugs (3).

Today's Challenge: Pangrams with a Purpose
Writing: Try writing a review/summary of your favorite book or movie in the form of a one-sentence pangram. Don't worry about the number of letters you use; instead, just make sure you include all 26 letter.

Reading: As you do your summer reading, look for a pangrammatic window: "a sequence of letters in a work of literature that contains all of the letters of the alphabet" (3). In English, all 26 letters appear on average in a random passage of 1,000 letters, but see if you can find a shorter example.

Quote of the Day: If the monkey could type one keystroke every nanosecond, the expected waiting time until the monkey types out 'Hamlet' is so long that the estimated age of the universe is insignificant by comparison ... this is not a practical method for writing plays.
--Gian-Carlo Rota

1 - Dyson, James and Robert Uhlig. Great Inventions. New York: Barnes & Nobles Books, 2001.

2 - Baron, Naomi S. Alphabet to Email: How Written English Evolved and Where It's Heading. London: Routledge, 2000.

3 - Cole, Chris. Wordplay: A Curious Dictionary of Language Oddities. New York: Sterling Publishing Co., Inc., 1999.

June 22: G. I. Day

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Sat, 22 Jun 2013 07:30:00 +0000

Today is the anniversary of one of the most significant pieces of legislation in American history. On this date, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt signed into law the Service Members' Readjustment Act of 1944, commonly known as the GI Bill. Between 1944 and 1956 more than 7.8 million World War II veterans participated in the educational or training program.

Prior to the GI Bill, a college education was primarily an option only for the rich. Likewise, home ownership was out of the financial reach of most Americans. The GI Bill, however, fueled the American Dreams of millions of returning GIs. Almost half took advantage of the education and training aspects of the programs, while nearly 2.4 million took out home loans backed by the Veterans Administration.

With the end of World War II in sight, the GI Bill was a proactive step to prevent the problems that occurred in after World War I. Thousands of returning American soldiers at that time were given just $60 and a train ticket home. There was little thought of helping these doughboys with the transition from military to civilian life. During the Great Depression, thousands of veterans marched on Washington, D.C. in 1932 demanding payment of a promised bonus. Instead of money, the veterans received an order to disperse. President Herbert Hoover called up active duty soldiers, led by General Douglas MacArthur, to clear out the Bonus Marchers' camps using tear gas, bayonets, and rifles.

Soldiers returning from World War II thankfully had the GI Bill to ease them back into civilian life. Instead of unrest at the nation's capital, an unprecedented post-war boom across the nation resulted after World War II.

In 1984 the GI Bill was revamped under the leadership of Mississippi Congressman Gillespie V. "Sonny" Montgomery. Known as the Montgomery GI Bill, it features VA home loan guarantees as well as education programs just like the original GI Bill (1).

The abbreviation G.I. originates from the a U.S. Army designation for galvanized iron, the kind of iron used for heavy garbage cans. The term, through misinterpretation of the initials, came to mean government-issue or general-issue in the 1930s, referring to items issued to soldiers upon induction into the armed forces -- items such as uniforms, boots, or soap. The term GI first appeared in print referring to an enlisted man in 1939. In 1942 a comic strip for the Army weekly Yank used the term GI Joe, further popularizing the term (2).

In the armed forces shorthand language, such as abbreviations and acronyms, is used with a high frequency, so much so that the Army, for example, has an entire regulation devoted to the subject. It's called Army Regulation 25-52: Authorized Abbreviations, Brevity Codes, and Acronyms (ABCA).

The three different classes of shortened forms are defined in the regulation as follows:

Abbreviation: An abbreviation is a shortened form of a word or phrase. For example, appt - appointment, assgd - assigned, or PA - Pennsylvania.
Acronym: An acronym is a word formed from the initial letters of a name or parts of a series of words. For example, ACTS means Army Criteria Tracking System; ARIMS means Army Records Information Management System; and ASAP means as soon as possible.
Brevity Code: A brevity code is the shortened form of a frequently used phrase, sentence, or group of sentences, normally consisting entirely of upper case letters; for example, COMSEC means communications security, REFRAD means release from active duty, and SIGINT means signals intelligence.

Today's Challenge: The Army's ABCs
Below is a list of common U. S. Army abbreviations, brevity codes, and acronyms. See if you can identify what each stands for.

1. BDU

2. CONUS

3. IED

4. IRR

5. HMMWV (Humvee)

6. MRE

7. NBC

8. ROTC

9. RPG

10.PT

11. PX

12. SOP

Quote of the Day: Neither a wise nor a brave man lies down on the tracks of history to wait for the train of the future to run over him. --Dwight D. Eisenhower

Answers: 1. Battle Dress Uniform 2. Continental United States 3. Improvised Explosive Device 4. Individual Ready Reserve 5. High Mobility Multi-purpose Wheeled Vehicle 6. Meals Ready to Eat 7. Nuclear, Biological, Chemical 8. Reserve Officer Training Corps 9. Rocket Propelled Grenade 10. Physical Training 11. Post Exchange 12. Standard Operating Procedure

1- United States Department of Veterans Affairs.
http://www.gibill.va.gov/GI_Bill_Info/history.htm

2 - Ayto, John. 20th Century Words. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999.

3 - Army Regulation 25-52.

June 21: Buy A Book Day

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Fri, 21 Jun 2013 07:30:00 +0000

On this date in 2003, 16-year old Emerson Spartz traveled nearly 4,000 miles, from Chicago to London, to buy a copy of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. Spartz could have stayed in the United States since the American release of the book was on the same day as the British release, but Spartz said that he wanted to be "where the story began" and to "feel the weight of that book" (1). The fifth installment in the Harry Potter series, Order of the Phoenix weighed in at 768 pages.

Almost ten years earlier the New York Times featured an article called The End of Books that speculated whether or not books and other print-based media were on their way out, being superceded by computer technology, principally hypertext. This is certainly not the first time that anyone prematurely declared books dead. As early as 1894 Scriberner's Magazine had an article entitled The End of Books relaying the predictions of Arthur Blackcross, who claimed that inventions like the photograph and the Kinetoscope, the first silent movie projector, would replace the antiquated written page.

John H. Lienhard, Professor Emeritus of Mechanical Engineering and History at the University of Houston, makes an interesting analogy, challenging the conventional wisdom that says that new technologies replace old ones:

So, are paper books doomed? Oddly enough, they're not. Think about pianos. Pianos evolved from harpsichord improvements. But soon they were something wholly different. You still need a harpsichord for harpsichord music. In this century, cars replaced horses. But cars aren't much use in rough, roadless country (2).

Lienhard continues to argue in the article that books do something for us that no other media can. Instead of just supplying us images and sounds in a passive manner, books allow us to participated in the creation of images as we read actively and interact imaginatively with the text. Perhaps that's why readers like Emerson Spartz are willing to travel to distant cities to feel the weight of a book in their own hands.

And speaking of distant cities --the Greek word for book biblos originates from the name of a Phonecian city, Byblos, renowned for its manufacturing of paper from the Egyptian papyrus plant. It's the same root from which we get the word Bible, meaning book of books.

Today's Challenge: A Stack of Book Words
A book for all book lovers,(sometimes called bibliophiles) is A Passion for Books, a treasury of stories, essays, and lists all related to books. In a chapter called Bibliolexicon, it lists a number of words with the biblio root. See if you can match up each word with its correct definition. When you finish, go to your local bookstore and buy a book.

1. Bibliobibule
2. Biblioclast
3. Bibliodemon
4. Biblioklept
5. Bibliolater
6. Bibliophage
7. Bibliophobe
8. Biblioriptos
9. Bibliosopher
10. Bibliotaphe

A. One who steals books
B. One who buries or hides books
C. One who worships books
D. One who tears pages from or otherwise destroys books
E. A book fiend or demon
F. One who eats or devours books
G. One who reads too much
H. One who fears books
I. One who throws books around
J. One who gains wisdom from books (3)

Quote of the Day:
For books are more than books, they are the life
The very heart and core of ages past,
The reason why men lived and worked and died,
The essence and quintessence of their lives.
--Amy Lowell

Answers: 1. G 2. D 3. E 4. A 5. C 6. F 7. H 8. I 9. J 10. B

1 - Grobman, Paul. Vital Statistics: An Amazing Compendium of Factoids, Minutiae, and Random Bits of Wisdom. New York: Plume Books, 2005.

2 - Lienhard, John H. Engines of Ingenuity Episode No. 2009: "The End of Books: 1894" http://www.uh.edu/engines/epi2009.htm

3 - Rabinowitz, Harold and Rob Kaplan (Editors). Passion for Books: A Book Lover's Treasury. New York: Times Books, 1999.

June 20: Hot Line, Cold War Day

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Thu, 20 Jun 2013 07:30:00 +0000

Today is the anniversary of an important date in the history of communications. On this date in 1963 at Geneva, the United States and the Soviet Union signed what was called the "Hot Line Agreement," which established a direct communication link between the two superpowers.

After the Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962, it became abundantly clear that without prompt, direct communication between the heads of state in the East and the West, tragic miscommunication leading to nuclear war might result. During the 1962 exercise in brinkmanship, President John F. Kennedy and Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev were forced to use intermediaries in their communications.

The Hot Line Agreement was the first bilateral agreement between the U.S. and the Soviet Union and the first step in recognizing that cooler heads should prevail when it comes the Cold War maneuvering of the nuclear powers (1).

It was the Soviet Union that first proposed the hot line in 1954. The word hot line first appeared in print in 1955, and the word brinkmanship, meaning the art of advancing to the very brink of war but not engaging in it, first appeared in 1956 (2).

Probably the most famous demonstration of the red phone comes to us via Hollywood rather than the history books. In the 1964 film Dr. Strangelove, President Merkin Muffley, played by Peter Sellers, struggles to tell Soviet Premier Kissoff that an insane American general has ordered a nuclear bombing mission on Russia.

President Merkin Muffley: . . . Now then, Dmitri, you know how we've always talked about the possibility of something going wrong with the Bomb... The Bomb, Dmitri... The hydrogen bomb!... Well now, what happened is... ah... one of our base commanders, he had a sort of... well, he went a little funny in the head... you know... just a little... funny. And, ah... he went and did a silly thing... Well, I'll tell you what he did. He ordered his planes... to attack your country... Ah... Well, let me finish, Dmitri... Let me finish, Dmitri... Well listen, how do you think I feel about it?... Can you imagine how I feel about it, Dmitri?... Why do you think I'm calling you? Just to say hello?... Of course I like to speak to you!... Of course I like to say hello!... Not now, but anytime, Dmitri. I'm just calling up to tell you something terrible has happened... It's a friendly call. Of course it's a friendly call... Listen, if it wasn't friendly... you probably wouldn't have even got it . . . .

Today's Challenge: Hot and Cold Running IdiomsBelow are descriptions of expressions that contain either the word hot or cold. Given the number of words in each expression along with a description, see if you can name the phrase:

1. Four words: Newly printed; sensational and exciting.

2. Two words: Immediate, complete withdrawal from something, especially an addictive substance.

3. Two words: Trouble or difficulty.

4. Two words: Retreat from an undertaking; lose one's nerve.

5. Two words: Deliberate disregard, slight, or snub.

6. Four words: Extremely angry.

7. Four words: In a position of extreme stress, as when subjected to harsh criticism.

8. Five words: To cause one to shiver from fright or horror.

Quote of the Day: Hot heads and cold hearts never solved anything. --Billy Graham

Answers: 1. Hot off the presses 2. Cold turkey 3. Hot water 4. Cold feet 5. cold shoulder 6. Hot under the collar 7. In the hot seat 8. Make one's blood run cold.

1 - United States Department of State. Memorandum of Understanding Between The U.S. and the U.S.S.R. Regarding the Establishment of a Direct Communication Link
http://www.state.gov/t/isn/4785.htm

2- Ayto, John. Twentieth Century Words. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999.

3 - Ammer, Christine. American Heritage Dictionary of Idioms. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1997.

June 19: Create A Monster Day

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Wed, 19 Jun 2013 07:30:00 +0000

Today marks the anniversary of one history's most remarkable meeting of literary minds. On the night of June 19, 1816, Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Mary Shelley, and Byron's doctor and travel companion Dr. John Polidori met in a villa on the shores of Lake Geneva, Switzerland.
Inspired no doubt by the unseasonably stormy weather of that summer, caused by the eruption of Tambora, a volcano in Indonesia, the group gathered to read aloud from a collection of German ghost stories, called The Fantasmagoriana. These stories inspired Lord Byron to challenge each person in the group to compose a ghost story (1).

One might guess that the two established poets Byron and Shelley would battle for first place in the contest; however, it was the two members of the party without literary reputation who rose to the challenge, each creating a monster that would change literature forever.

The English Doctor, John Polidori, wrote what has come to be called the first vampire tale, a short story called "The Vampyre," published in 1819. Although his story is not widely read today, it predates other stories in the vampire genre and is seen as the inspiration of the masters of the form: Sheridan le Fanu, Edgar Allen Poe, and, of course, Bram Stoker, the author of Dracula (2).

As far as the overall winner of the contest, based on the criteria of both influence and creativity, the award must go to Mary Shelley, whose contribution to the contest later became her novel Frankenstein (1818). In her introduction to Frankenstein, Mary credits a conversation between Byron and her husband, Shelley, as the inspiration for her story. She listened attentively as the two poets discussed Darwin's discoveries and as they speculated about whether or not the secret of life could be found and whether or not a human corpse could be reanimated.

That evening the seeds of the poets' conversation germinated in Mary's mind, producing a vivid nightmare that gave her the story that would captivate readers and moviegoers for generations. In her introduction to Frankenstein, Mary Shelley describes what she saw in her nightmare:

I saw the pale student of unhallowed arts kneeling beside the thing he had put together. I saw the hideous phantasm of a man stretched out, and then, on the working of some powerful engine, show signs of life and stir with an uneasy, half-vital motion. Frightful must it be, for supremely frightful would be the effect of any human endeavor to make the stupendous mechanism of the Creator of the world. His success would terrify the artist; he would rush away from his odious handiwork, horror-stricken. He would hope that, left to itself, the slight spark of life which he had communicated would fade, that this thing which had received such imperfect animation would subside into dead matter, and he might sleep in the belief that the silence of the grave would quench forever the transient existence of the hideous corpse which he had looked upon as the cradle of life. He sleeps; but he is awakened; he opens his eyes; behold, the horrid thing stands at his bedside, opening his curtains and looking on him with yellow, watery, but speculative eyes.

As a result of Byron's contest, on this one faithful day, two unique literary monsters were born.

Today's Challenge: Famous Monsters of Book Land
Long before Shelley and Polidori created their monsters, other monsters filled the pages of ancient myth. See if you can match up each monster below with its appropriate description. Then, challenge your family or a group of friends to create their own horror stories and monsters.

1. Grendal

2. Cyclopes

3. Minotaur

4. Cerberus

5. Hydra

6. Sphinx

7. Harpies

8. Medusa

A. The many-headed snake that Hercules defeated in one of his labors.

B. The monster that Beowulf fought and killed in the Old English epic.

C. The creature with a bull's head and a man's body that was confined in the Labyrinth until it was killed by Theseus.

D. The Gorgon who had snakes for hair and turned anyone who looked at her into stone. She was killed by Perseus.

E. The monster with the wings and claws of a vulture and the head and body of a woman.

F. The winged monster with a woman's head and a lion's body. It challenged travellers with a riddle and killed them when they failed to solve it. It killed itself when Oedipus finally solved its riddle.

G. The three-headed dog who guards the entrance to Hades.

H. The race of one-eyed giants who made thunderbolts for Zeus.

Quote of the Day: Everyone thinks I'm a horrible person, but I'm really not. In fact, I have the heart of a child, and I keep it in a jar on my desk. --Stephen King

Answer: 1. B 2. H 3. C 4. G 5. A 6. F 7. E 8. D

1 - Woodbridge, Kim. "The Summer of 1816."
http://www.kimwoodbridge.com/maryshel/summer.shtml

2 - John Polidori & The Vampyre Byron
http://www.angelfire.com/jazz/louxsie/polidori.html

June 18: Dr. Johnson's Dictionary Day

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Tue, 18 Jun 2013 07:30:00 +0000

On this date in 1746 Dr. Samuel Johnson, poet and critic, signed a contract with bookseller Robert Dodsley to write the first comprehensive dictionary of the English language. Johnson thought he would complete the project in three years, but the dictionary was not completed and published until April 15, 1755.

Although it took six years longer than he first estimated, it was worth the wait. The dictionary contained 40,000 words and definitions, along with 114,000 supporting quotations, and is written with precision, clarity, and wit. Johnson did for English in nine years what it had taken 40 French lexicographers 40 years to complete for the French language (1).

Here are few examples of words and definition from Johnson's Dictionary of the English Language:

Amulet: An appended remedy, or preservative: a thing hung about the neck, or any other part of the body, for preventing or curing some particular diseases.

Lexicographer: A writer of dictionaries; a harmless drudge, that busies himself in tracing the original and detailing the signification of words.

Microscope: An optick instrument, contrived various ways to give to the eye a large appearance of many objects which could not otherwise be seen.
Zootomy: Dissection of the bodies of beasts.
In his Preface, Johnson talks about the challenges he faced in trying to harness the recalcitrant words of English:

When I took the first survey of my undertaking, I found our speech copious without order, and energetick without rules: wherever I turned my view, there was perplexity to be disentangled, and confusion to be regulated; choice was to be made out of boundless variety, without any established principle of selection; adulterations were to be detected, without a settled test of purity, and modes of expression to be rejected or received, without the suffrages of any writers of classical reputation or acknowledged authority.

Having therefore no assistance but from general grammar, I applied myself to the perusal of our writers; and noting whatever might be of use to ascertain or illustrate any word or phrase, accumulated in time the materials of a dictionary, which, by degrees, I reduced to method, establishing to myself, in the progress of the work, such rules as experience and analogy suggested to me; experience, which practice and observation were continually increasing; and analogy, which, though in some words obscure, was evident in others.

Johnson's Dictionary of the English Language set the standard for future dictionaries. Unlike other languages like French and Italian that established academies to fix the language and prescribe how words should be used, Johnson's approach was not to prescribe but to describe the language. In this way, instead of fixing the language Johnson registered the English language by basing his definitions not solely upon his own whims, but upon the written record of centuries of writers in English. In the words of Simon Winchester, Johnson's method created "a whole new way of dictionary making, and an entirely new intellectual approach to the language, had been inaugurated" (2).

Johnson's process inspired the writers of the Oxford English Dictionary, whose 10 volumes were completed in 1928. And still today English lexicographers take the descriptive approach to dictionary writing by reading all kinds of published words and recording how the meaning of words are changing and what new words are appearing.

Today's Challenge: The Only Constant is Change
New editions of dictionaries in English are published every year because the language is constantly changing. Because of this change, some of the words from Johnson's Dictionary have very different definitions today than they did in 1755. See if you can match up the eight definitions and eight words below from Johnson's dictionary (3).

1. A hog dressed whole, in the West Indian manner.
2. Something yet unpublished; secret history.
3. The stone in the bladder.
4. Goods in the wife's disposal.
5. A medical prescription.
6. The refuse of any thing.
7. Splendid; magnificent; grand.
8. A small cup.

A. Anecdote
B. Barbecue
C. Calculus
D. Cruise
E. Paraphernalia
F. Pompous
G. Recipe
H. Riffraff

1. B 2. A 3. C 4. E 5. G 6. H 7. F 8. D

Quote of the Day: At painful times, when composition is impossible and reading is not enough, grammars and dictionaries are excellent for distraction. --Elizabeth Barrett Browning

1 - McCrum, Robert, Wiliam Cran, and Robert MacNeil. The Story of English. New York: Penguin Books, 1987.

2 -Winchester, Simon. The Meaning of Everything: The Story of the Oxford English Dictionary. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003.

3 - Hitchings, Henry. Defining the World: The Extraordinary Story of Dr. Johnson's Dictionary. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005.