Daily Content Archive
(as of Monday, February 10, 2020)| Word of the Day | |||||||
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assiduity
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| Daily Grammar Lesson | |
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Using the Future Perfect ContinuousThe future perfect continuous tense is used in a very similar way to the future perfect to describe the duration of a completed future action. They both carry the same meaning when used in this way, but the future perfect continuous emphasizes what? More... | |
| Article of the Day | |
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 William II of EnglandWilliam Rufus was a Norman king of England who disliked the English and their culture and was, in turn, despised by his subjects and in conflict with the church. He inherited the throne in 1087 from his father, who had conquered England, and he ruled until 1100, subjugating Scotland and Wales. He never married or produced offspring, and his younger brother succeeded him after he was killed by a misfired arrow. Why do some question whether his death was really an accident? More... | |
| This Day in History | |
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 HMS Dreadnought Is Launched (1906)The HMS Dreadnought of the Royal Navy was a battleship that revolutionized naval power when it entered service in 1906. Dreadnought represented such a marked advance in naval technology that its name came to be associated with an entire generation of battleships, the "dreadnoughts," as well as the class of ships named for it, while the generation of ships it made obsolete became known as "pre-dreadnoughts." What features made the Dreadnought so advanced? More... | |
| Today's Birthday | |
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 Boris Pasternak (1890)Pasternak was a Russian author whose novel Doctor Zhivago, an epic of wandering, spiritual isolation and love amid the harshness of the revolution and its aftermath, became a bestseller in the West but was circulated only in secrecy in the Soviet Union until 1987. Pasternak was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1958, but he was forced to decline it because of Soviet opposition to his work. Why was Pasternak's name said to have been crossed off an execution list by Joseph Stalin? More... | |
| Quotation of the Day | |
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 Did it ever strike you, on such a morning as this, that drowning would be happiness and peace?Charles Dickens (1812-1870) | |
| Idiom of the Day | |
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hit the big time— To become very famous or successful. More... | |
| Today's Holiday | |
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 Feast of St. Paul's Shipwreck (2024)This feast is a commemoration in Malta of the shipwreck of St. Paul on the island in 60 CE, an event told about in the New Testament. When storms drove the ship aground, Paul was welcomed by the "barbarous people" (meaning they were not Greco-Romans). According to legend, he got their attention when a snake bit him on the hand but did him no harm, and he then healed people of diseases. Paul is the patron saint of Malta and snakebite victims. The day is a public holiday, and is observed with family gatherings and religious ceremonies and processions. More... | |
| Word Trivia | |
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Today's topic: networkburele, burelage - A network of fine lines or dots, as on a postage stamp, is called burele or burelage. More... network - Traceable to the early 16th century, it indicates a web of connections that link objects, institutions, and/or people. More... limbic system - From Latin limbus, "edge," it is the network of the brain involving areas near the edge of the cortex and controls the basic emotions and drives. More... neural, neural network - Neural comes from Greek neuron, "nerve"; neural network can now refer to computer architecture in which processors are connected in a manner suggestive of connections between neurons. More... | |