Daily Content Archive
(as of Wednesday, August 28, 2019)| Word of the Day | |||||||
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scarecrow
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| Daily Grammar Lesson | |
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Indefinite PronounsAn indefinite pronoun is used in place of a noun without specifying a particular person or thing that is being represented. Why are many pronouns that refer to more than one—e.g., everything, everyone, much, etc.— considered singular? More... | |
| Article of the Day | |
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 Wardian CasesThe forerunner of the modern terrarium, the Wardian case was a small glass container for housing ferns and similar plants. It was invented in 1829 by physician and amateur botanist Nathaniel Bagshaw Ward after he noticed that, though the polluted London air was taking a toll on ferns in his garden, fern spores inside the glass bottles where he kept cocoons were germinating. His invention allowed plants to be shipped great distances and helped advance the Victorian craze for growing what flower? More... | |
| This Day in History | |
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 Lynching of 14-Year-Old Boy Helps Inspire US Civil Rights Movement (1955)At age 14, African-American Emmett Till was murdered in Mississippi after reportedly whistling at a white woman, Carolyn Bryant, in a grocery store. Her husband and his half-brother beat Till, shot him in the head, and dumped his body in the Tallahatchie River, weighing it down by tying a metal fan around his neck with barbed wire. Till's body was pulled from the river three days later. What decision made by Till's mother about her son's funeral helped bring attention to his brutal murder? More... | |
| Today's Birthday | |
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 Vladimir Shukhov (1853)Though less widely known than his contemporaries Thomas Edison and Gustave Eiffel, Russian engineer, scientist, and architect Vladimir Shukhov has drawn comparisons to both of them. His innovations in the petroleum refining process and the means of transporting petroleum products revolutionized the oil industry, while his architectural works were of a sort never seen before. He pioneered the construction of thin-shell and tensile structures as well as what innovative type of curved structure? More... | |
| Quotation of the Day | |
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 I am a lover and have not found my thing to love.Sherwood Anderson (1876-1941) | |
| Idiom of the Day | |
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toss (one's) hat in(to) the ring— To announce or make known one's intention to compete against others for something, especially in a political race. More... | |
| Today's Holiday | |
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 Feast of St. Augustine of Hippo (2023)St. Augustine is best known for his spiritual autobiography, the Confessions, which detail the excesses of his youth, his career as a teacher of rhetoric, his years as a believer in Manicheism and Platonism, and his belated conversion to Christianity. It is primarily for his writings that he is known as the patron saint of theologians and scholars, and one of the "Four Latin Fathers" of the Christian Church. When a company of Spanish soldiers landed on the coast of Florida on St. Augustine's Day in 1565, they named the U.S.'s oldest European community after him. More... | |
| Word Trivia | |
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Today's topic: musical instrumentpiano word - One in which all of its letters can be played as notes on a musical instrument (e.g. cabbage). More... cord, chord - Cord comes from Greek khorde, "gut, string of a musical instrument," and chord is a refashioning of cord. More... sweet potato - An informal name for the ocarina, a musical instrument. More... tone color - The same as timbre, the quality of sound that distinguishes one voice or musical instrument from another. More... | |