Daily Content Archive

(as of Sunday, September 23, 2018)
Word of the Day

objectify

Definition:(verb) Make impersonal or present as an object.
Synonyms:depersonalize
Usage: Pornography objectifies women.
Daily Grammar Lesson

Adverbs of Degree

Adverbs of degree are used to indicate the intensity, degree, or extent of the verb, adjective, or adverb they are modifying. What are grading adverbs? More...
Article of the Day

Euripides

Euripides was a Greek playwright recognized, along with Aeschylus and Sophocles, as one of Athens's three great tragic dramatists. Unlike his contemporaries, who concerned themselves with grandiose themes and deities, Euripides wrote about ordinary people and social issues. He began competing in the dramatic festival of Dionysus in 455 BCE and won his first victory in 441 BCE. Of his 92 plays, only about 19 survive. Many of his plays are resolved by a deus ex machina, which is what? More...
This Day in History

Merchant Royal Sinks, Taking Cargo of Gold and Silver with Her (1641)

A holy grail of marine salvage, the wreck of the Merchant Royal, one of the most valuable of all time, has eluded treasure hunters for centuries. When the leaky, 17th-century English merchant ship sank in rough weather in the vicinity of the Isles of Scilly and southwestern England, she took with her a fabled cargo of gold, silver, and precious gems worth over a billion dollars today. Among the riches lost in the wreck was the money to pay whom? More...
Today's Birthday

Typhoid Mary (1869)

Mary Mallon was the first person in the US to be identified as a healthy carrier of typhoid fever. In 1904, a typhoid epidemic was traced to homes where she had been a cook. She fled but was located by authorities and forcibly quarantined for several years. In 1910, she was released on the condition that she not take another food-handling job. Discovered cooking again in 1914, she was quarantined for life. Though she herself never had the disease, she infected about 50 people. How many died? More...
Quotation of the Day
Pride is one of the seven deadly sins; but it cannot be the pride of a mother in her children, for that is a compound of two cardinal virtues—faith and hope.

Charles Dickens (1812-1870)

Idiom of the Day

have (something) in (one's) hands

To have under one's control, charge, or care; to have responsibility for something. More...
Today's Holiday

Aizu Byakko Matsuri (2023)

Aizu was once the sturdiest castle in northeast Japan, but it was destroyed in a battle between the Emperor's forces and the Shogun's forces in 1868. The Byakkotai, or White Tiger Band, young men who vowed to lay down their lives in defense of the castle, saw what they thought was fire rising from the walls. Thinking it had fallen into enemy hands, they killed themselves. Each September to commemorate their courage, there is a procession of 500 warriors and a lantern procession through Aizu Wakamatsu, where the original members of the White Tiger Band are buried. More...
Word Trivia

Today's topic: staff

baguette - Means "little rod" and is derived from Latin baculum, "staff, stick." More...

dough - As in money, it almost certainly came from bread (another slang term for it), because bread is the staff of life. More...

staff - From Germanic stabaz, "stick"; its sense as "employees" is probably an allusion to the carrying of a staff of office by a person in charge. More...

miter, mitre, crosier - The tall, pointy hat of a bishop or abbot is the miter/mitre—from Greek mitra, "headdress"; a crosier is a bishop's staff. More...

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