Fact of the Day : What is a chiasmus? (from A Dictionary of Psychology)
chiasmus n. A figure of speech in which the main elements are repeated in a reversed order to create a symmetrically balanced structure, as in Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country (The inaugural address of John F. Kennedy, 1917–63, 35th US president, 20 January 1961).
Two of the best psychological examples are I'd rather have a full bottle in front of me than a full-frontal lobotomy and the following mordant comment on achieving something that makes others jealous: It's champagne for my real friends and real pain for my sham friends. chiasmi pl. chiasmic adj. [From Greek chiasmos a crisscross arrangement, from chiasma a cross, named after the shape of the upper-case letter chi (X) + ismos indicating a state or condition]
How to cite this entry:
"chiasmus n." A Dictionary of Psychology. Edited by Andrew M. Colman. Oxford University Press 2009. Oxford Reference Online. Oxford University Press. 26 January 2012
Thursday, January 26, 2012
Wednesday, January 25, 2012
Word of the Day
Word of the Day for Wednesday, January 25, 2012
bleb \bleb\, noun: .
1.A bubble.
2. Medicine/Medical. A blister or vesicle.
One day, as he was bathing her, a bleb of shampoo had streamed into her eye, and she had kept a hand pressed to it for the rest of the day, quailing away from him whenever he walked past. -- Kevin Brockmeier, "Things That Fall From the Sky"
His gaze skims over the computer out the side-yard window, to rest on a fat avocado, a bleb of green light hanging from a branch. -- Diana Abu-Jaber, "Birds of Paradise"
Bleb was first used in the early 1600s. It is considered imitative of a blister itself. It is also related to the Middle English word blob.
Dictionary.com Word of the Day
http://www.dictionary.com/wordoftheday/
bleb \bleb\, noun: .
1.A bubble.
2. Medicine/Medical. A blister or vesicle.
One day, as he was bathing her, a bleb of shampoo had streamed into her eye, and she had kept a hand pressed to it for the rest of the day, quailing away from him whenever he walked past. -- Kevin Brockmeier, "Things That Fall From the Sky"
His gaze skims over the computer out the side-yard window, to rest on a fat avocado, a bleb of green light hanging from a branch. -- Diana Abu-Jaber, "Birds of Paradise"
Bleb was first used in the early 1600s. It is considered imitative of a blister itself. It is also related to the Middle English word blob.
Dictionary.com Word of the Day
http://www.dictionary.com/wordoftheday/
Free Museum Pass at The Yocum Library
The Prints of Andy Warhol at the Reading Public Museum March 3 - June 17, 2012
More than 60 pop prints and four paintings are the focus of an exciting exhibition in The Museum's second floor temporary galleries.Iconic works by one of the leading figures in twentieth-century art include Marilyn Monroe, Elizabeth Taylor, Jackie Kennedy, Mao Tse-Tung, Mick Jagger, Ronald Reagan, and Judy Garland, along with the artist's famous Soup Cans and Camouflage prints.
This exhibition provides an outstanding overview of Warhol's career as a printmaker. The photographic silk screens date from the early 1960s to the late 1980s.
In addition to the prints and paintings, this special "expanded" exhibition will feature two more engaging aspects of Warhol's career - in one gallery, an installation of "Silver Clouds" which recreates a 1966 exhibition that the artist mounted at the Leo Castilli Gallery in New York City consisting of large, free-floating Mylar® pillow-shaped balloons, and in another, a continuous screening of a dozen of Warhol's famous "Screen Tests." Some of these highlight well-known figures such as Dennis Hopper, Edie Sedgwick, Lou Reed, Allen Ginsberg, Salvador Dali, and Marcel Duchamp.
The exhibition was organized by The Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, is underwritten by the Marlin and Ginger Miller Exhibition Endowment, and supported in part by Clermont Wealth Strategies at Fulton Bank.
The Reading Public Museum is supported in part by grants from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts. Image:
Andy Warhol, Self-Portrait, ca.1967, screenprint on ivory paper. Image © 2012 The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc. / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
500 Museum Road • Reading, PA 19611 • 610-371-5850 www.readingpublicmuseum.org
Tuesday, January 24, 2012
Word of the Day
Word of the Day for Tuesday, January 24, 2012
educe \ih-DOOS\, verb:
1. To draw forth or bring out, as something potential or latent.
2. To infer or deduce.
Forty or fifty minutes of vigorous and unslackened analytic thought bestowed upon one of them usually suffices to educe from it all there is to educe, its general solution… -- Edited by Umberto Eco and Thomas A. Sebeok, "The Sign of Three: Dupin, Holmes, Peirce"
If, after this, you can possibly want any further aid towards knowing what Sir Lionel was, we can tell you, that in his soul "the scientific combinations of thought could educe no fuller harmonies of the good and the true, than lay in the primaeval pulses which floated as an atmosphere around it!"... -- George Eliot, "Middlemarch"
Related to educate, educe is derived from the Latin roots ex- meaning "out" and ducere meaning "to lead."
Dictionary.com Word of the Day
http://www.dictionary.com/wordoftheday/
educe \ih-DOOS\, verb:
1. To draw forth or bring out, as something potential or latent.
2. To infer or deduce.
Forty or fifty minutes of vigorous and unslackened analytic thought bestowed upon one of them usually suffices to educe from it all there is to educe, its general solution… -- Edited by Umberto Eco and Thomas A. Sebeok, "The Sign of Three: Dupin, Holmes, Peirce"
If, after this, you can possibly want any further aid towards knowing what Sir Lionel was, we can tell you, that in his soul "the scientific combinations of thought could educe no fuller harmonies of the good and the true, than lay in the primaeval pulses which floated as an atmosphere around it!"... -- George Eliot, "Middlemarch"
Related to educate, educe is derived from the Latin roots ex- meaning "out" and ducere meaning "to lead."
Dictionary.com Word of the Day
http://www.dictionary.com/wordoftheday/
Yocum Library Collection
 |
General Collection
PN2287.F4255 A3 2011
|
by Tina Fey
Summary: From her youthful days as a vicious nerd to her tour of duty on Saturday Night Live; from her passionately halfhearted pursuit of physical beauty to her life as a mother eating things off the floor; from her one-sided college romance to her nearly fatal honeymoon, comedian Tina Fey reveals all, and proves that you're no one until someone calls you bossy.
Contents: Origin story -- Growing up and liking it -- All girls must be everything -- Delaware County summer showtime! -- That's Don Fey -- Climbing Old Rag Mountain -- Young Men's Christian Association -- The Windy City, full of meat -- My honeymoon, or, A supposedly fun thing I'll never do again either -- The secrets of Mommy's beauty -- Remembrances of being very very skinny -- Remembrances of being a little bit fat -- A childhood dream, realized -- Peeing in jars with boys -- I don't care if you like it -- Amazing, gorgeous, not like that -- Dear Internet -- 30 Rock : an experiment to confuse your grandparents -- Sarah, Oprah, and Captain Hook -- There's a drunk midget in my house -- A celebrity's guide to celebrating the birth of Jesus -- Juggle this -- The mother's prayer for its daughter -- What turning forty means to me -- What should I do with my last five minutes?
Fact of the Day
Fact of the Day : In the world of theatre who was Mistinguett? (from The Concise Oxford Companion to the Theatre)
Mistinguett [ Jeanne-Marie Bourgeois ] (1875–1956), Flemish-born French music-hall artist, with beautiful (and highly insured) legs, mischievous good looks, and a smart line in repartee. ‘Miss’, as she was nicknamed, was a symbol of Paris to millions of tourists, and even to Parisians themselves, for over half a century.
In her early years she was an eccentric comedienne, specializing in character sketches of low-life Parisian women, but, reversing the usual pattern, she later became almost exclusively a dancer and singer, appearing first at the Moulin Rouge, of which she was for some time part-proprietor, and, with Maurice Chevalier as her partner, at the Folies-Bergère, where she was seen in some sensational dances, descending with superb panache vast staircases, wearing enormous hats and trailing yards of feathered train.
She became world famous in spite of hardly ever appearing outside Paris, her one appearance in London being at the London Casino (later the Prince Edward Theatre) in 1947 at the age of 72.
How to cite this entry: "Mistinguett" The Concise Oxford Companion to the Theatre. Ed. Phyllis Hartnoll and Peter Found. Oxford University Press, 1996. Oxford Reference Online. Oxford University Press. 24 January 2012
Mistinguett [ Jeanne-Marie Bourgeois ] (1875–1956), Flemish-born French music-hall artist, with beautiful (and highly insured) legs, mischievous good looks, and a smart line in repartee. ‘Miss’, as she was nicknamed, was a symbol of Paris to millions of tourists, and even to Parisians themselves, for over half a century.
In her early years she was an eccentric comedienne, specializing in character sketches of low-life Parisian women, but, reversing the usual pattern, she later became almost exclusively a dancer and singer, appearing first at the Moulin Rouge, of which she was for some time part-proprietor, and, with Maurice Chevalier as her partner, at the Folies-Bergère, where she was seen in some sensational dances, descending with superb panache vast staircases, wearing enormous hats and trailing yards of feathered train.
She became world famous in spite of hardly ever appearing outside Paris, her one appearance in London being at the London Casino (later the Prince Edward Theatre) in 1947 at the age of 72.
How to cite this entry: "Mistinguett" The Concise Oxford Companion to the Theatre. Ed. Phyllis Hartnoll and Peter Found. Oxford University Press, 1996. Oxford Reference Online. Oxford University Press. 24 January 2012
Monday, January 23, 2012
Word of the Day
Word of the Day for Monday, January 23, 2012
slimsy \SLIM-zee\, adjective: Flimsy; frail.
"Nice girl . . ." he mused, "but sort of thin and slimsy and delicate, not robust and hearty like the kind of girl you ought to have on a farm." -- Bess Streeter Aldrich, "A White Flying Bird"
The coat was a slimsy bit of dark silk, with a glister in it; and the hat was the thinnest straw, the brim curling a little in the wind. -- Max Brand, "Storm on the Range"
Slimsy is an Americanism that came into common use in the 1830s and early 1840s. It is a combination of slim and flimsy.
Dictionary.com Word of the Day
http://www.dictionary.com/wordoftheday/
slimsy \SLIM-zee\, adjective: Flimsy; frail.
"Nice girl . . ." he mused, "but sort of thin and slimsy and delicate, not robust and hearty like the kind of girl you ought to have on a farm." -- Bess Streeter Aldrich, "A White Flying Bird"
The coat was a slimsy bit of dark silk, with a glister in it; and the hat was the thinnest straw, the brim curling a little in the wind. -- Max Brand, "Storm on the Range"
Slimsy is an Americanism that came into common use in the 1830s and early 1840s. It is a combination of slim and flimsy.
Dictionary.com Word of the Day
http://www.dictionary.com/wordoftheday/
Fact of the Day
Fact of the Day : Who wrote the Booker Prize-winning novel Schindler's Ark? (from The Oxford Companion to Australian History)
Keneally, Thomas Michael (1935– ), writer and republican, studied for the Catholic priesthood but never took orders. Instead he turned to teaching and fiction-writing. His first novel, The Place at Whitton, was published in 1964. Much of Keneally's fiction has a historical basis. Blood Red Sister Rose (1974) recounts the life of Jeanne d'Arc, and Schindler's Ark (1982), which won the Booker Prize and was later made into an acclaimed feature film by Steven Spielberg, tells the story of war hero Oskar Schindler.
Novels with Australian settings include Bring Larks and Heroes (1967); The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith (1972), based on the story of Jimmy Governor; The Cut-Rate Kingdom (1980), based on national politics during World War II; The Playmaker (1987), an account of Ralph Clark's efforts to direct the first theatrical performance in NSW; A River Town (1995), which recreates Keneally's childhood town of Kempsey, NSW, in the early 1900s; and The Cedar Shame (1998).
Religion and notions of good and evil, and punishment and redemption, are frequent themes in his fiction. Keneally has also written a travel memoir of Ireland, Now and in Time To Be (1991), and Our Republic (1993). He is a founder and prominent member of the Australian Republican Movement. Helen Doyle
How to cite this entry: Helen Doyle "Keneally, Thomas Michael" The Oxford Companion to Australian History. Ed. Graeme Davison, John Hirst and Stuart Macintyre. Oxford University Press, 2001. Oxford Reference Online. Oxford University Press. 23 January 2012
Keneally, Thomas Michael (1935– ), writer and republican, studied for the Catholic priesthood but never took orders. Instead he turned to teaching and fiction-writing. His first novel, The Place at Whitton, was published in 1964. Much of Keneally's fiction has a historical basis. Blood Red Sister Rose (1974) recounts the life of Jeanne d'Arc, and Schindler's Ark (1982), which won the Booker Prize and was later made into an acclaimed feature film by Steven Spielberg, tells the story of war hero Oskar Schindler.
Novels with Australian settings include Bring Larks and Heroes (1967); The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith (1972), based on the story of Jimmy Governor; The Cut-Rate Kingdom (1980), based on national politics during World War II; The Playmaker (1987), an account of Ralph Clark's efforts to direct the first theatrical performance in NSW; A River Town (1995), which recreates Keneally's childhood town of Kempsey, NSW, in the early 1900s; and The Cedar Shame (1998).
Religion and notions of good and evil, and punishment and redemption, are frequent themes in his fiction. Keneally has also written a travel memoir of Ireland, Now and in Time To Be (1991), and Our Republic (1993). He is a founder and prominent member of the Australian Republican Movement. Helen Doyle
How to cite this entry: Helen Doyle "Keneally, Thomas Michael" The Oxford Companion to Australian History. Ed. Graeme Davison, John Hirst and Stuart Macintyre. Oxford University Press, 2001. Oxford Reference Online. Oxford University Press. 23 January 2012
Sunday, January 22, 2012
Word of the Day
Word of the Day for Sunday, January 22, 2012
natheless \NEYTH-lis\, adverb: Nevertheless.
Natheless, it was I who did educate Miss Lucy in all useful learning. -- Sir Walter Scott, "Guy Mannering"
Natheless, God send you good success, and to that end will we pray. -- Mark Twain, "A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court"
Natheless is an Old English word. Nā meant "not" in Old English, and the other roots (the and less) have remained constant in modern English.
Dictionary.com Word of the Day
http://www.dictionary.com/wordoftheday/
natheless \NEYTH-lis\, adverb: Nevertheless.
Natheless, it was I who did educate Miss Lucy in all useful learning. -- Sir Walter Scott, "Guy Mannering"
Natheless, God send you good success, and to that end will we pray. -- Mark Twain, "A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court"
Natheless is an Old English word. Nā meant "not" in Old English, and the other roots (the and less) have remained constant in modern English.
Dictionary.com Word of the Day
http://www.dictionary.com/wordoftheday/
Sarah's Key
New to the Yocum Library Collection, "Sarah's Key"
Paris, July 1942: Sarah, a ten-year old girl, is taken with her parents by the French police as they go door-to-door arresting Jewish families in the middle of the night. Desperate to protect her younger brother, Sarah locks him in a bedroom cupboard -- their secret hiding place -- and promises to come back for him as soon as they are released.
Sixty seven years later: Sarah's story intertwines with that of Julia Jarmond, an American journalist investigating the roundup. In her research, Julia stumbles onto a trail of secrets that link her to Sarah, and to questions about her own romantic future.
Paris, July 1942: Sarah, a ten-year old girl, is taken with her parents by the French police as they go door-to-door arresting Jewish families in the middle of the night. Desperate to protect her younger brother, Sarah locks him in a bedroom cupboard -- their secret hiding place -- and promises to come back for him as soon as they are released.
Sixty seven years later: Sarah's story intertwines with that of Julia Jarmond, an American journalist investigating the roundup. In her research, Julia stumbles onto a trail of secrets that link her to Sarah, and to questions about her own romantic future.
Fact of the Day
Fact of the Day : For what kind of art was American Jean-Michel Basquiat best known? (from A Dictionary of Modern and Contemporary Art)
Basquiat, Jean-Michel (1960–88) American painter, a key figure in the transition of Graffiti art from a street phenomenon to the world of galleries and mainstream modern art. He was born in Brooklyn, New York, to a Haitian father and a Puerto Rican mother. From 1977, when he definitively left home after a patchy school career, he worked on the streets in New York in collaboration with Al Diaz writing slogans with felt-tip, always with the signature SAMO©.
As a publicity tactic this was enormously effective. In 1980 he met Andy Warhol and Henry Geldzahler and his work was praised in the influential publication Art in America. In 1981 he had his first solo exhibition at the Annina Nosei Gallery, which for a period also became the studio for the homeless artist. International success followed, his work corresponding very much to the tendency of the period towards Neo-Expressionism. He also made works in collaboration with Warhol.
His early death from a drug overdose was followed by critical reassessment, and the enormous impact his paintings had made when first seen was sometimes ascribed to clever marketing. Robert Hughes described his story as ‘the tale of a small untrained talent caught in the buzz saw of art-world promotion, absurdly overrated by dealers, collectors, critics, and, not least, himself’.
However, there have also been serious attempts to assess his work in the light of interest in black culture. His work has constant references to jazz and African sculpture. Richard Powell points out the recurring motif of the ‘see-through man’, which ‘spoke to the notion that anatomy had a theatrical quality that, when paired with blackness, was a radical attack on society's superficiality and deep-seated racism’.
Despite its origins in the street, Basquiat's art was very different from the subway graffiti which, in the early 1980s, were beginning to get serious academic and market attention. Instead of the smooth contours and shadings of the spray can, Basquiat's paintings have a raw violence. They knowingly refer to an idea of an African heritage mediated through modernist artists such as Picasso and Dubuffet.
Some of the paintings have highly complex surfaces mixing colour photocopies with the paint. In 1996 a film about his life was released, directed by Julian Schnabel.
How to cite this entry: "Basquiat, Jean-Michel" A Dictionary of Modern and Contemporary Art by Ian Chilvers and John Glaves-Smith. Oxford University Press Inc. Oxford Reference Online. Oxford University Press. 22 January 2012
Basquiat, Jean-Michel (1960–88) American painter, a key figure in the transition of Graffiti art from a street phenomenon to the world of galleries and mainstream modern art. He was born in Brooklyn, New York, to a Haitian father and a Puerto Rican mother. From 1977, when he definitively left home after a patchy school career, he worked on the streets in New York in collaboration with Al Diaz writing slogans with felt-tip, always with the signature SAMO©.
As a publicity tactic this was enormously effective. In 1980 he met Andy Warhol and Henry Geldzahler and his work was praised in the influential publication Art in America. In 1981 he had his first solo exhibition at the Annina Nosei Gallery, which for a period also became the studio for the homeless artist. International success followed, his work corresponding very much to the tendency of the period towards Neo-Expressionism. He also made works in collaboration with Warhol.
His early death from a drug overdose was followed by critical reassessment, and the enormous impact his paintings had made when first seen was sometimes ascribed to clever marketing. Robert Hughes described his story as ‘the tale of a small untrained talent caught in the buzz saw of art-world promotion, absurdly overrated by dealers, collectors, critics, and, not least, himself’.
However, there have also been serious attempts to assess his work in the light of interest in black culture. His work has constant references to jazz and African sculpture. Richard Powell points out the recurring motif of the ‘see-through man’, which ‘spoke to the notion that anatomy had a theatrical quality that, when paired with blackness, was a radical attack on society's superficiality and deep-seated racism’.
Despite its origins in the street, Basquiat's art was very different from the subway graffiti which, in the early 1980s, were beginning to get serious academic and market attention. Instead of the smooth contours and shadings of the spray can, Basquiat's paintings have a raw violence. They knowingly refer to an idea of an African heritage mediated through modernist artists such as Picasso and Dubuffet.
Some of the paintings have highly complex surfaces mixing colour photocopies with the paint. In 1996 a film about his life was released, directed by Julian Schnabel.
How to cite this entry: "Basquiat, Jean-Michel" A Dictionary of Modern and Contemporary Art by Ian Chilvers and John Glaves-Smith. Oxford University Press Inc. Oxford Reference Online. Oxford University Press. 22 January 2012
Saturday, January 21, 2012
The Help
Added to the Yocum Library Collection.
The Help *Based on one of the most talked about books in years and a #1 New York Times best-selling phenomenon, "The Help" stars Emma Stone ("Easy A") as Skeeter, Academy Award®--nominated Viola Davis ("Doubt") as Aibileen and Octavia Spencer as Minny—three very different, extraordinary women in Mississippi during the 1960s, who build an unlikely friendship around a secret writing project that breaks societal rules and puts them all at risk. From their improbable alliance a remarkable sisterhood emerges, instilling all of them with the courage to transcend the lines that define them, and the realization that sometimes those lines are made to be crossed—even if it means bringing everyone in town face-to-face with the changing times. Deeply moving, filled with poignancy, humour and hope, "The Help" is a timeless and universal story about the ability to create change.
*http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XYuIDh05hEs
The Help *Based on one of the most talked about books in years and a #1 New York Times best-selling phenomenon, "The Help" stars Emma Stone ("Easy A") as Skeeter, Academy Award®--nominated Viola Davis ("Doubt") as Aibileen and Octavia Spencer as Minny—three very different, extraordinary women in Mississippi during the 1960s, who build an unlikely friendship around a secret writing project that breaks societal rules and puts them all at risk. From their improbable alliance a remarkable sisterhood emerges, instilling all of them with the courage to transcend the lines that define them, and the realization that sometimes those lines are made to be crossed—even if it means bringing everyone in town face-to-face with the changing times. Deeply moving, filled with poignancy, humour and hope, "The Help" is a timeless and universal story about the ability to create change.
*http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XYuIDh05hEs
Fact of the Day
Fact of the Day : Which piece of music is nicknamed the Frog Quartet? (from The Oxford Companion to Music)
‘Frog’ Quartet (Froschquartett). Nickname of Haydn's String Quartet in D major op. 50 no. 6 (1787), which has a ‘croaking’ theme in the finale.
How to cite this entry: "‘Frog’ Quartet" The Oxford Companion to Music. Ed. Alison Latham. Oxford University Press, 2002. Oxford Reference Online. Oxford University Press. 21 January 2012
‘Frog’ Quartet (Froschquartett). Nickname of Haydn's String Quartet in D major op. 50 no. 6 (1787), which has a ‘croaking’ theme in the finale.
How to cite this entry: "‘Frog’ Quartet" The Oxford Companion to Music. Ed. Alison Latham. Oxford University Press, 2002. Oxford Reference Online. Oxford University Press. 21 January 2012
Word of the Day
Word of the Day for Saturday, January 21, 2012
remora \REM-er-uh\, noun:
1. An obstacle, hindrance, or obstruction.
2. Any of several fishes of the family Echeneididae, having on the top of the head a sucking disk by which they can attach themselves to sharks, turtles, ships, and other moving objects.
Notwithstanding the extreme unpopularity of the Duke of Kent as a soldier, there was no remora to his employment. -- Robert Huish, "The History of the Life and Reign of William the Fourth"
They all coexist today in diachronic contradictions, and what coexists is the colonial remora of Bolivian history, the different articulations of colonizing forces and colonized victims. -- Walter D. Mignolo, "Local Histories/Global Designs: Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledges, and Border Thinking"
Remora is derived from the Latin word remorārī meaning "to delay."
Dictionary.com Word of the Day
http://www.dictionary.com/wordoftheday/
remora \REM-er-uh\, noun:
1. An obstacle, hindrance, or obstruction.
2. Any of several fishes of the family Echeneididae, having on the top of the head a sucking disk by which they can attach themselves to sharks, turtles, ships, and other moving objects.
Notwithstanding the extreme unpopularity of the Duke of Kent as a soldier, there was no remora to his employment. -- Robert Huish, "The History of the Life and Reign of William the Fourth"
They all coexist today in diachronic contradictions, and what coexists is the colonial remora of Bolivian history, the different articulations of colonizing forces and colonized victims. -- Walter D. Mignolo, "Local Histories/Global Designs: Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledges, and Border Thinking"
Remora is derived from the Latin word remorārī meaning "to delay."
Dictionary.com Word of the Day
http://www.dictionary.com/wordoftheday/
Friday, January 20, 2012
Word of the Day
Word of the Day for Friday, January 20, 2012
deucedly \DOO-sid-lee\, adverb:
Devilishly; damnably.
When I went in I had seen that there was a deucedly pretty girl sitting in that particular seat, so I had taken the next one. -- P. G. Wodehouse, "Man With Two Left Feet and Other Stories "
It's most important. You will put me in a deucedly awkward position if you don't. -- C. S. Lewis, "The Magician's Nephew"
Deucedly is related to the word deuce which refers to the face of a die with one dot, as in "to roll deuces." It comes from the Latin word for two, duos. In the mid-1600s, it became associated with bad luck, probably because it was the lowest score you could get when playing dice.
Dictionary.com Word of the Day
http://www.dictionary.com/wordoftheday/
deucedly \DOO-sid-lee\, adverb:
Devilishly; damnably.
When I went in I had seen that there was a deucedly pretty girl sitting in that particular seat, so I had taken the next one. -- P. G. Wodehouse, "Man With Two Left Feet and Other Stories "
It's most important. You will put me in a deucedly awkward position if you don't. -- C. S. Lewis, "The Magician's Nephew"
Deucedly is related to the word deuce which refers to the face of a die with one dot, as in "to roll deuces." It comes from the Latin word for two, duos. In the mid-1600s, it became associated with bad luck, probably because it was the lowest score you could get when playing dice.
Dictionary.com Word of the Day
http://www.dictionary.com/wordoftheday/
Submit a Short Story
Attention all writers, if you have a story you want to submit and possibly have it posted on the Yocum Library blog, send it to theyocumlibrary@gmail.com Subject: short story for the blog.
Miriam Stone from InterLibrary Loan wrote and submitted her short story,
How far we’ve come in a few short years – a short story by Miriam Stone. The story was posted December 3, 2011.
I am looking forward to reading your short story.
Kathy Nye - Editor - The Yocum Library Blog
Miriam Stone from InterLibrary Loan wrote and submitted her short story,
How far we’ve come in a few short years – a short story by Miriam Stone. The story was posted December 3, 2011.
I am looking forward to reading your short story.
Kathy Nye - Editor - The Yocum Library Blog
Midnight in Paris
Just in ...The Yocum Library has the DVD "Midnight in Paris." Great movie for Woody Allen fans. After midnight in Pais, go back to the 1920's and to the times of Ernest Hemingway, Scott and Zelda Fitgerald and Gertrude Stein.
Fact of the Day
Fact of the Day : How did the word 'janitor' originate? (from The Oxford Dictionary of Word Origins)
janitor [M16th] A caretaker or doorkeeper in North America is referred to as a janitor, a word that was borrowed into English from Latin junua ‘door’.
This comes from Janus, the name of an ancient Italian god regarded as the doorkeeper of heaven, and the guardian of doors and gates. He was traditionally represented with two faces, so that he could look both backwards and forwards. January comes from a Latin word meaning ‘month of Janus’, and marks the entrance to the year.
How to cite this entry: "janitor" Oxford Dictionary of Word Origins. by Julia Cresswell. Oxford Reference Online. Oxford University Press. 20 January 2012
janitor [M16th] A caretaker or doorkeeper in North America is referred to as a janitor, a word that was borrowed into English from Latin junua ‘door’.
This comes from Janus, the name of an ancient Italian god regarded as the doorkeeper of heaven, and the guardian of doors and gates. He was traditionally represented with two faces, so that he could look both backwards and forwards. January comes from a Latin word meaning ‘month of Janus’, and marks the entrance to the year.
How to cite this entry: "janitor" Oxford Dictionary of Word Origins. by Julia Cresswell. Oxford Reference Online. Oxford University Press. 20 January 2012
Thursday, January 19, 2012
Scheduled Classes for Computers
10 a.m. - 11a.m. Reserved
Where: Yocum Instruction Area
Description:
Tutor Training Session presented by Ms. Kim Stahler, Ms. Brenna
Corbit, & Ms. Patricia Nouhra.
Where: Yocum Instruction Area
Description:
Tutor Training Session presented by Ms. Kim Stahler, Ms. Brenna
Corbit, & Ms. Patricia Nouhra.
Word of the Day
Word of the Day for Thursday, January 19, 2012
shiv \shiv\, noun:
A knife, especially a switchblade.
Then this one cop, the guy, he pulls out a picture, shows me a photograph, see, of my shiv. Now, I gotta tell ya, this shiv of mine's no ordinary blade. -- Ashok Mathur, "Once Upon an Elephant"
“Why would he wipe the shiv?” Decker said. “Supposedly it was his shiv, not hers. Of course it would have his prints on it. Seems to me he'd just stick it back in its sheath and leave.” -- Faye Kellerman, "Milk and Honey"
First used in English in the early 1600s, shiv is of unknown origin, but it may be related to the Romany word for knife, chiv.
Dictionary.com Word of the Day
http://www.dictionary.com/wordoftheday/
shiv \shiv\, noun:
A knife, especially a switchblade.
Then this one cop, the guy, he pulls out a picture, shows me a photograph, see, of my shiv. Now, I gotta tell ya, this shiv of mine's no ordinary blade. -- Ashok Mathur, "Once Upon an Elephant"
“Why would he wipe the shiv?” Decker said. “Supposedly it was his shiv, not hers. Of course it would have his prints on it. Seems to me he'd just stick it back in its sheath and leave.” -- Faye Kellerman, "Milk and Honey"
First used in English in the early 1600s, shiv is of unknown origin, but it may be related to the Romany word for knife, chiv.
Dictionary.com Word of the Day
http://www.dictionary.com/wordoftheday/
Fact of the Day
Fact of the Day : What instructions were given in the Zimmermann Note, a secret telegram sent on this day in 1917? (from A Dictionary of Contemporary World History )
Zimmermann Note (19 Jan. 1917) A secret telegram containing a coded message from the German Foreign Secretary Alfred Zimmermann, to the German minister in Mexico City. It instructed the minister to propose an alliance with Mexico if war broke out between the USA and Germany, Mexico being offered the territories lost in 1848 to the USA.
The British intercepted and decoded the message, and passed it to the US State Department. It was released on 1 March 1917 as German–US relations were deteriorating over unrestricted submarine warfare. The Note was considered an overt act of German aggression, in blatant disregard of the Monroe Doctrine (1823) which rejected European interference in matters concerning the American hemisphere.
Coming after years of debate, it was the final catalyst to propel the USA into World War I, with war being declared on Germany on 6 April 1917.
How to cite this entry: "Zimmermann Note" A Dictionary of Contemporary World History. Jan Palmowski. Oxford University Press, 2008. Oxford Reference Online. Oxford University Press. 19 January 2012
Zimmermann Note (19 Jan. 1917) A secret telegram containing a coded message from the German Foreign Secretary Alfred Zimmermann, to the German minister in Mexico City. It instructed the minister to propose an alliance with Mexico if war broke out between the USA and Germany, Mexico being offered the territories lost in 1848 to the USA.
The British intercepted and decoded the message, and passed it to the US State Department. It was released on 1 March 1917 as German–US relations were deteriorating over unrestricted submarine warfare. The Note was considered an overt act of German aggression, in blatant disregard of the Monroe Doctrine (1823) which rejected European interference in matters concerning the American hemisphere.
Coming after years of debate, it was the final catalyst to propel the USA into World War I, with war being declared on Germany on 6 April 1917.
How to cite this entry: "Zimmermann Note" A Dictionary of Contemporary World History. Jan Palmowski. Oxford University Press, 2008. Oxford Reference Online. Oxford University Press. 19 January 2012
Wednesday, January 18, 2012
Scheduled Classes for Computers
8:30 a.m. - 9:30 a.m. Reserved
Where: Yocum Instruction Area
Description: Mrs. Neuin ORI102 (25) Intro to Library PP presented by Ms.Kim Stahler
11:15 a.m. - 1:45 p.m. Reserved
Where: Yocum Instruction Area
Description: Christine Brown ORI-102 (30) Introduction to The Yocum Library presented by Ms. Kim Stahler
Where: Yocum Instruction Area
Description: Mrs. Neuin ORI102 (25) Intro to Library PP presented by Ms.Kim Stahler
11:15 a.m. - 1:45 p.m. Reserved
Where: Yocum Instruction Area
Description: Christine Brown ORI-102 (30) Introduction to The Yocum Library presented by Ms. Kim Stahler
Word of the Day
Word of the Day for Wednesday, January 18, 2012
persnickety \per-SNIK-i-tee\, adjective:
1. Overparticular; fussy.
2. Snobbish or having the aloof attitude of a snob.
3. Requiring painstaking care.
These critics can take some consolation by looking at the recent rehabilitation of Hamilton Grange, the upper Manhattan house built by founding father Alexander Hamilton. It shows just how persnickety a preservation project can be. -- Robbie Whelan, "Historic Home on the Grange," The Wall Street Journal, December 11, 2011
The point here is to make your animal understand that its upstairs neighbour is exceptionally persnickety about territory. -- Yann Martel, "Life of Pi"
Persnickety dates back to the late 1800s. It is a variant of the Scots word pernickety, which is of uncertain origin. Pernickety is perhaps related to other Scots words with the per- prefix, like perskeet which meant "fastidious."
Dictionary.com Word of the Day
http://www.dictionary.com/wordoftheday/
persnickety \per-SNIK-i-tee\, adjective:
1. Overparticular; fussy.
2. Snobbish or having the aloof attitude of a snob.
3. Requiring painstaking care.
These critics can take some consolation by looking at the recent rehabilitation of Hamilton Grange, the upper Manhattan house built by founding father Alexander Hamilton. It shows just how persnickety a preservation project can be. -- Robbie Whelan, "Historic Home on the Grange," The Wall Street Journal, December 11, 2011
The point here is to make your animal understand that its upstairs neighbour is exceptionally persnickety about territory. -- Yann Martel, "Life of Pi"
Persnickety dates back to the late 1800s. It is a variant of the Scots word pernickety, which is of uncertain origin. Pernickety is perhaps related to other Scots words with the per- prefix, like perskeet which meant "fastidious."
Dictionary.com Word of the Day
http://www.dictionary.com/wordoftheday/
Fact of the Day
Fact of the Day : Who was the Roman god of wine and revelry? (from The Oxford Companion to the Body)
Bacchus The Roman god of wine and revelry, Bacchus, seems to have been formed from the hellenization of the native Italian god Liber, patron of viticulture, to become a Roman version of Dionysos. Like Dionysos (see Greeks), Bacchus is associated predominantly with female followers (in Greek, these were known as maenads) and is also traditionally accompanied by goat–man satyrs (see chimera) who are in a state of almost perpetual sexual arousal.
The secret rites of Bacchus, the Bacchanalia, were introduced to Rome in the third century BC, and were officially banned from Italy in a famous decree of 186 BC, apparently because of fears that the meetings associated with them were being used for political conspiracies; the authority of the leader of a Bacchic cell over those who belonged to it could be seen as threatening the authority of the family and of the patron–client system which linked members of society through vertical ties. In art, Bacchus is represented as a curly-haired child drinking wine; as a young man, naked apart from a crown of vine leaves and grapes; or heavily drunk, sometimes being put to bed by nymphs and satyrs. Helen King
How to cite this entry: Helen King "Bacchus" The Oxford Companion to the Body. Ed. Colin Blakemore and Sheila Jennett. Oxford University Press, 2001. Oxford Reference Online. Oxford University Press. 18 January 2012
Bacchus The Roman god of wine and revelry, Bacchus, seems to have been formed from the hellenization of the native Italian god Liber, patron of viticulture, to become a Roman version of Dionysos. Like Dionysos (see Greeks), Bacchus is associated predominantly with female followers (in Greek, these were known as maenads) and is also traditionally accompanied by goat–man satyrs (see chimera) who are in a state of almost perpetual sexual arousal.
The secret rites of Bacchus, the Bacchanalia, were introduced to Rome in the third century BC, and were officially banned from Italy in a famous decree of 186 BC, apparently because of fears that the meetings associated with them were being used for political conspiracies; the authority of the leader of a Bacchic cell over those who belonged to it could be seen as threatening the authority of the family and of the patron–client system which linked members of society through vertical ties. In art, Bacchus is represented as a curly-haired child drinking wine; as a young man, naked apart from a crown of vine leaves and grapes; or heavily drunk, sometimes being put to bed by nymphs and satyrs. Helen King
How to cite this entry: Helen King "Bacchus" The Oxford Companion to the Body. Ed. Colin Blakemore and Sheila Jennett. Oxford University Press, 2001. Oxford Reference Online. Oxford University Press. 18 January 2012
Tuesday, January 17, 2012
Scheduled Classes for Computers
8:30 a.m. - 9:30 a.m.
Reserved Where: The Yocum Library Instruction Area
Description: Mrs. Moyer ORI102 924) Intro to Library PowerPoint presented by Ms. Valerie Schaeffer
9:30 a.m. - 10:30 a.m.
Reserved Where: Yocum Instruction Area
Description: Ms. Cathy Faller ORI102 (26) Intro to Library PowerPoint presented by Ms. Kim Stahler
11:15 a.m. - 1:45 p.m.
Reserved Where: Yocum Instruction Area
Description: Christine Brown ORI-102 (30) Using Proquest Central online database presented by Ms. Kim Stahler
Reserved Where: The Yocum Library Instruction Area
Description: Mrs. Moyer ORI102 924) Intro to Library PowerPoint presented by Ms. Valerie Schaeffer
9:30 a.m. - 10:30 a.m.
Reserved Where: Yocum Instruction Area
Description: Ms. Cathy Faller ORI102 (26) Intro to Library PowerPoint presented by Ms. Kim Stahler
11:15 a.m. - 1:45 p.m.
Reserved Where: Yocum Instruction Area
Description: Christine Brown ORI-102 (30) Using Proquest Central online database presented by Ms. Kim Stahler
Reading Public Museum
Free Reading Museum passes at the Yocum Library - 1 week loan
Theresienstadt's Children and Their Art
Exhibition to
Open at the Reading Public MuseumTheresienstadt's Children and Their Art
February 18 – May 13, 2012
This meaningful exhibition features more than 30 objects from the Beit Theresienstadt Holocaust Museum, Archive and Educational Center in Israel.
The works, including collages, drawings, embroidery, dolls, diaries, magazines, games, and marionettes, were created by children at the Theresienstadt ghetto in what is now the Czech Republic.
The Theresienstadt Ghetto, (Terezin in Czech) was established in the northwestern part of the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia on November 24, 1941. It was alleged to be a "Jewish town" for the Protectorate's Jews, but was in fact a Concentration and Transit Camp, which functioned until its liberation on May 8, 1945. During its operation, 12,171 Jewish children (born 1928-1945) were sent to GhettoTheresienstadt; 9,001 of these children were deported to the "East", of whom 325 survived.
For many of the children, these objects are the only things that remain from their lives. This exhibition is part of The Theresienstadt Project, a collaborative educational effort among the Reading Public Museum, the Reading Symphony Orchestra, and the Jewish Federation of Reading.
For related events and additional funding information, click here. Opening Reception - Saturday, February 18 – 6 - 8 p.m. $15 for Members / $20 for Non-Members. Light hors d' oeuvres and refreshments will be served. Please RSVP to lauren.mccarroll@readingpublicmuseum.org or by calling 610-371-5850 x264.
http://www.readingpublicmuseum.org/index.php
Word of the Day
Word of the Day for Tuesday, January 17, 2012
alate \EY-leyt\, adjective:
1. Having wings; winged.
2. Having membranous expansions like wings.
noun:
1. The winged form of an insect when both winged and wingless forms occur in the species.
Vainly a few diehard physicists pointed out that wings are of no propulsive help in airless void, that alate flight is possible only where there are wind currents to lift and carry.--Robert Silverberg, Earth is the "Strangest Planet"
There are no words branded into this gate, only the shape of a large bird with its wings stretched out over the width of the road like an alate protector. -- Jenny Siler, "Easy Money"
Alate is comprised of the Latin roots āla meaning "wing" and the suffix -ate which was used in Latin to make a word an adjective (like separate) but in English came to be used to create a verb out of a noun (like agitate).
Dictionary.com Word of the Day
http://www.dictionary.com/wordoftheday/
alate \EY-leyt\, adjective:
1. Having wings; winged.
2. Having membranous expansions like wings.
noun:
1. The winged form of an insect when both winged and wingless forms occur in the species.
Vainly a few diehard physicists pointed out that wings are of no propulsive help in airless void, that alate flight is possible only where there are wind currents to lift and carry.--Robert Silverberg, Earth is the "Strangest Planet"
There are no words branded into this gate, only the shape of a large bird with its wings stretched out over the width of the road like an alate protector. -- Jenny Siler, "Easy Money"
Alate is comprised of the Latin roots āla meaning "wing" and the suffix -ate which was used in Latin to make a word an adjective (like separate) but in English came to be used to create a verb out of a noun (like agitate).
Dictionary.com Word of the Day
http://www.dictionary.com/wordoftheday/
Fact of the Day
Fact of the Day : In British history who succeeded Queen Victoria to the throne? (from A Dictionary of Contemporary World History )
Edward VII ( Albert Edward ) (b. 9 Nov. 1841, d. 6 May 1910). King of Great Britain and Ireland and Dependencies Overseas, Emperor of India 1901–10 Born in Sandringham, Norfolk, the second child of Queen Victoria. He waited many years to become King, and when he did so, he refurbished many of the monarchy's ceremonial aspects. He also asserted his right to be consulted over political decisions.
His claims were disregarded by Prime Ministers, but he did have a role in foreign affairs. Many saw him as influential in securing the Entente Cordiale and the Anglo‐Russian Entente, through his influence on European royal families and dignitaries.
How to cite this entry: " Edward VII " A Dictionary of Contemporary World History. Jan Palmowski. Oxford University Press, 2008. Oxford Reference Online. Oxford University Press. 17 January 2012
Edward VII ( Albert Edward ) (b. 9 Nov. 1841, d. 6 May 1910). King of Great Britain and Ireland and Dependencies Overseas, Emperor of India 1901–10 Born in Sandringham, Norfolk, the second child of Queen Victoria. He waited many years to become King, and when he did so, he refurbished many of the monarchy's ceremonial aspects. He also asserted his right to be consulted over political decisions.
His claims were disregarded by Prime Ministers, but he did have a role in foreign affairs. Many saw him as influential in securing the Entente Cordiale and the Anglo‐Russian Entente, through his influence on European royal families and dignitaries.
How to cite this entry: " Edward VII " A Dictionary of Contemporary World History. Jan Palmowski. Oxford University Press, 2008. Oxford Reference Online. Oxford University Press. 17 January 2012
Monday, January 16, 2012
Martin Luther King Day 2012
I Have a Dream Speech Martin Luther King's Address
at March on Washington August 28, 1963. Washington, D.C.
" When we let freedom ring, when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God's children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual, "Free at last! free at last! thank God Almighty, we are free at last!"
Fact of the Day
Fact of the Day : In which year was the medical textbook Gray's Anatomy first published? (from The Oxford Companion to the Body)
Gray, Henry Henry Gray (1827–61) was a London surgeon, who, in 1858, published the first edition of a medical text book entitled Anatomy: descriptive and surgical. In later years — first informally, and, after 1938, formally — the book became known as Gray's Anatomy. It is one of the few medical texts known by name to the general public. Henry Gray was born in Windsor Castle, but lived in Belgravia for most of his life. The family had moved to be closer to Buckingham Palace on the accession of William IV, to whom Gray's father, William, was Deputy Treasurer.
Aged 18 Henry entered St George's Hospital at Hyde Park Corner in Central London, and he qualified as a Member of the Royal College of Surgeons in 1848, the same year in which he won one of the College's triennial essay prizes for an account of the nerves of the human eye. As a student he was known for his diligent attention, especially in anatomical studies, and in particular for performing numerous dissections himself. Gray remained at St George's in House Surgeon positions, and continued his anatomical work, publishing several of his anatomical observations in papers in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society.
In 1852 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society. From that time on he devoted himself to anatomy, serving St George's as a demonstrator, later as Lecturer on Anatomy, and as Curator of the Museum. The appearance of his book was timely. Medical education in Britain was being professionalized and formalized — in that same year, 1858, the Medical Act was passed in Britain, creating the General Medical Council (GMC), the regulatory and licensing authority of the medical profession. This epitomized the growing professional status of medicine in Britain, with regulated access and recognized training procedures and courses taking place in properly accredited institutions.
Simultaneously, new scientific approaches to medicine were developing, which were being incorporated into the medical curricula. Gray's book was not the first anatomy textbook — especially since the passing of the Anatomy Act of 1832 (which provided legitimate sources of bodies for dissection), guides and manuals had been produced for medical and surgical students. What distinguished Gray's book was the number and quality of illustrations, and his emphasis on anatomy as the practical basis of surgery.
The premier medical journals of the time, The Lancet and The British Medical Journal, praised its style and content, and the latter's review prophesied that it would become the manual of anatomy. A year after its appearance in Britain, an American edition was produced, and a second edition was produced in London in 1860 — just before the death of its young author, at the age of 34, from smallpox contracted after nursing a nephew.
Gray's loss to anatomy was mourned by many colleagues; one of them, Timothy Holmes, who was a fellow surgeon from St George's, continued to produce new editions of Gray's book up to 1880 (the 9th edition). He in turn was succeeded by another practising surgeon, T. Pickering Pick, and it was not until 1901 (the 15th edition) that a professional anatomist — one who earned his living by teaching and studying anatomy, rather than from surgery — was appointed as editor.
In 1995 the 38th edition appeared. Continuing the tradition of generous illustrations begun by its eponymous founder, Gray's Anatomy now provides a coherent account of the structure of the human body from the ultra-microscopical to the population level — and anatomy is now presented as a central discipline in the natural sciences, not merely of relevance to the practising surgeon. E.M. Tansey See also anatomy.
How to cite this entry: E.M. Tansey "Gray, Henry" The Oxford Companion to the Body. Ed. Colin Blakemore and Sheila Jennett. Oxford University Press, 2001. Oxford Reference Online. Oxford University Press. 16 January 2012
Gray, Henry Henry Gray (1827–61) was a London surgeon, who, in 1858, published the first edition of a medical text book entitled Anatomy: descriptive and surgical. In later years — first informally, and, after 1938, formally — the book became known as Gray's Anatomy. It is one of the few medical texts known by name to the general public. Henry Gray was born in Windsor Castle, but lived in Belgravia for most of his life. The family had moved to be closer to Buckingham Palace on the accession of William IV, to whom Gray's father, William, was Deputy Treasurer.
Aged 18 Henry entered St George's Hospital at Hyde Park Corner in Central London, and he qualified as a Member of the Royal College of Surgeons in 1848, the same year in which he won one of the College's triennial essay prizes for an account of the nerves of the human eye. As a student he was known for his diligent attention, especially in anatomical studies, and in particular for performing numerous dissections himself. Gray remained at St George's in House Surgeon positions, and continued his anatomical work, publishing several of his anatomical observations in papers in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society.
In 1852 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society. From that time on he devoted himself to anatomy, serving St George's as a demonstrator, later as Lecturer on Anatomy, and as Curator of the Museum. The appearance of his book was timely. Medical education in Britain was being professionalized and formalized — in that same year, 1858, the Medical Act was passed in Britain, creating the General Medical Council (GMC), the regulatory and licensing authority of the medical profession. This epitomized the growing professional status of medicine in Britain, with regulated access and recognized training procedures and courses taking place in properly accredited institutions.
Simultaneously, new scientific approaches to medicine were developing, which were being incorporated into the medical curricula. Gray's book was not the first anatomy textbook — especially since the passing of the Anatomy Act of 1832 (which provided legitimate sources of bodies for dissection), guides and manuals had been produced for medical and surgical students. What distinguished Gray's book was the number and quality of illustrations, and his emphasis on anatomy as the practical basis of surgery.
The premier medical journals of the time, The Lancet and The British Medical Journal, praised its style and content, and the latter's review prophesied that it would become the manual of anatomy. A year after its appearance in Britain, an American edition was produced, and a second edition was produced in London in 1860 — just before the death of its young author, at the age of 34, from smallpox contracted after nursing a nephew.
Gray's loss to anatomy was mourned by many colleagues; one of them, Timothy Holmes, who was a fellow surgeon from St George's, continued to produce new editions of Gray's book up to 1880 (the 9th edition). He in turn was succeeded by another practising surgeon, T. Pickering Pick, and it was not until 1901 (the 15th edition) that a professional anatomist — one who earned his living by teaching and studying anatomy, rather than from surgery — was appointed as editor.
In 1995 the 38th edition appeared. Continuing the tradition of generous illustrations begun by its eponymous founder, Gray's Anatomy now provides a coherent account of the structure of the human body from the ultra-microscopical to the population level — and anatomy is now presented as a central discipline in the natural sciences, not merely of relevance to the practising surgeon. E.M. Tansey See also anatomy.
How to cite this entry: E.M. Tansey "Gray, Henry" The Oxford Companion to the Body. Ed. Colin Blakemore and Sheila Jennett. Oxford University Press, 2001. Oxford Reference Online. Oxford University Press. 16 January 2012
Word of the Day
Word of the Day for Monday, January 16, 2012
perspicacious \pur-spi-KEY-shuhs\, adjective:
1. Having keen mental perception and understanding; discerning.
2. Archaic.Having keen vision.
You are perspicacious, know the ways of the world, and are more tactful than most men of your age. -- Alexandre Dumas, "The Count of Monte Cristo"
More perspicacious neighbors, the Paulsens among them, suspected that Joey also enjoyed being the smartest person in the house. -- Jonathan Franzen, "Freedom"
Perspicacious is derived from the Late Latin word perspicācitās meaning "sharpness of sight."
Dictionary.com Word of the Day
http://www.dictionary.com/wordoftheday/
perspicacious \pur-spi-KEY-shuhs\, adjective:
1. Having keen mental perception and understanding; discerning.
2. Archaic.Having keen vision.
You are perspicacious, know the ways of the world, and are more tactful than most men of your age. -- Alexandre Dumas, "The Count of Monte Cristo"
More perspicacious neighbors, the Paulsens among them, suspected that Joey also enjoyed being the smartest person in the house. -- Jonathan Franzen, "Freedom"
Perspicacious is derived from the Late Latin word perspicācitās meaning "sharpness of sight."
Dictionary.com Word of the Day
http://www.dictionary.com/wordoftheday/
Sunday, January 15, 2012
Word of the Day
Word of the Day for Sunday, January 15, 2012
outrance \oo-TRAHNS\, noun: The utmost extremity.
"Its prevailing features are equability, ease, perfect accuracy and purity of style, a manner never at outrance with the subject matter, pathos, and verisimilitude." -- Edgar Allen Poe, "The Linwoods"
I pretend not to be a champion of that same naked virtue called truth, to the very outrance. I can consent that her charms be hidden with a veil, were it but for decency's sake. -- Sir Walter Scott, "Kenilworth"
Outrance came from the Old French word oltrance meaning "to pass beyond." It is probably related to outrage.
Dictionary.com Word of the Day
http://www.dictionary.com/wordoftheday/
outrance \oo-TRAHNS\, noun: The utmost extremity.
"Its prevailing features are equability, ease, perfect accuracy and purity of style, a manner never at outrance with the subject matter, pathos, and verisimilitude." -- Edgar Allen Poe, "The Linwoods"
I pretend not to be a champion of that same naked virtue called truth, to the very outrance. I can consent that her charms be hidden with a veil, were it but for decency's sake. -- Sir Walter Scott, "Kenilworth"
Outrance came from the Old French word oltrance meaning "to pass beyond." It is probably related to outrage.
Dictionary.com Word of the Day
http://www.dictionary.com/wordoftheday/
Movie review: 'Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows — Part 2'
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Movie review: 'Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows — Part 2'
http://www.ew.com/ew/article/0,,20483133_20488634,00.html
Reviewed by Lisa Schwarzbaum | Jul 13, 2011
The thrilling conclusion to a phenomenal cinematic story 10 years in the telling, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows — Part 2 is proof that authentic movie excitement is its own form of magic. Half the spell-casting formula lies in what the audience itself brings to the eighth and final movie made from J.K. Rowling's culture-shaping literary epic: namely, its fondness for and fascination with every one of Rowling's characters, down to the last goblin, Death Eater, and professor of Defense Against the Dark Arts. (The sight of intrepid Maggie Smith as unsinkable Professor Minerva McGonagall is an occasion for unchecked delight; and look, there's indispensable David Bradley again as cranky caretaker Argus Filch!)
The potent second half of Harry's spell, meanwhile, consists of the artistic self-confidence and complexity with which the movies themselves have grown and deepened over the years. Raised to maturity under the well-tempered direction of David Yates and the wise screenwriting of Steve Kloves, the saga culminates in a finale as satisfying and emotionally intense — frightening, sad, and ultimately comforting — as it is visually grand. This is an ending suitable for The End. Millions already know what's at stake in Part 2, but those who don't won't find their surprise ruined in this review. It's safe to say that when the story resumes, Harry, Ron, and Hermione (Daniel Radcliffe, Rupert Grint, and Emma Watson, now graceful adults and graceful actors) continue their mission, established in Part 1, to destroy the rest of the seven magical Horcruxes that contain pieces of the soul of that hideous, snake-nosed be-all and end-all of evil, Lord Voldemort.
And as Voldemort, Ralph Fiennes reaches new expressive highs — better to call them lows? — with every crook of a fang-nailed finger signifying his pain and his fury at Harry, the Boy Who Lived. Time is running out. Hogwarts is under siege. Harry observes others sacrificing their lives to protect him (there's real death here, just like in the real world) and wrestles with his obligations, not only as a wizard but as a man. With so much heightened action and wrenching emotion, pacing is key. And here Yates and his outstanding production team excel. In an episode nearly bursting — at times precariously flooded — with the abundance of Rowling's imagination, the narrative clicks together like an enchanted puzzle. The set pieces are fantastical, including a wild ride — harking back to Harry's first broomstick escapades — in which Harry, Ron, and Hermione sneak into Gringotts Bank, past rows of Dickensian goblins, to break into Bellatrix Lestrange's vault.
The feeling that Voldemort and his dark minions are close on Harry's heels is palpable, making small moments of intimacy (Ron and Hermione kiss like adults — then giggle with surprise like children) all the more precious. Tragic, inscrutable former professor Severus Snape now emerges as a key player in Harry's fate. And as played with mysterious, concentrated power by Alan Rickman, Snape's character is so vividly established that even the shadowed silhouette of his Byronic black hair and cape triggers an immediate audience response. (Composer Alexandre Desplat assists with a score that tunes in to our collective aural memory of Potter movies past; production designer Stuart Craig excites our collective tactile senses with a finale-size wealth of evocative objects.)
In the end — the end before the movie manifestation of Rowling's gentle epilogue — Harry and his friends are, of course, much older than when they first caught the Hogwarts Express from Platform 9 ¾. And yet, united with their classmates and teachers to defend the school that shaped them (and also shaped more than one generation of readers and moviegoers), they're still so very young. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows — Part 2 leaves us with the dawning, awesome recognition that the world is huge, fraught, enigmatic, magical, dangerous, delightful, and, ultimately, the responsibility of young people who must first find their own footing. That's quite an accomplishment for a story about a boy with a wand.
Fact of the Day
Fact of the Day : In psychology what is the Cheshire Cat effect? (from A Dictionary of Psychology)
Cheshire Cat effect n. A form of binocular rivalry in which a moving object seen by one eye renders invisible a stationary object in the same region of the visual field seen by the other eye. The effect can be demonstrated vividly by dividing the visual field with a mirror held edge-on in front of the nose at a slight angle, so that one eye looks straight at a stationary object, such as a sleeping cat, while the other sees a reflection of stationary objects in another part of the environment.
If a hand is then waved about on the mirror side, in the region of the visual field where the cat is seen with the other eye, then part or the whole of the cat disappears. [Named after an episode at the end of Chapter 6 of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll, the pen name of Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (1832–98), in which the Cheshire Cat ‘vanished quite slowly, beginning with the end of the tail, and ending with the grin, which remained some time after the rest of it had gone’]
How to cite this entry: "Cheshire Cat effect n." A Dictionary of Psychology. Edited by Andrew M. Colman. Oxford University Press 2009. Oxford Reference Online. Oxford University Press. 15 January 2012
Cheshire Cat effect n. A form of binocular rivalry in which a moving object seen by one eye renders invisible a stationary object in the same region of the visual field seen by the other eye. The effect can be demonstrated vividly by dividing the visual field with a mirror held edge-on in front of the nose at a slight angle, so that one eye looks straight at a stationary object, such as a sleeping cat, while the other sees a reflection of stationary objects in another part of the environment.
If a hand is then waved about on the mirror side, in the region of the visual field where the cat is seen with the other eye, then part or the whole of the cat disappears. [Named after an episode at the end of Chapter 6 of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll, the pen name of Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (1832–98), in which the Cheshire Cat ‘vanished quite slowly, beginning with the end of the tail, and ending with the grin, which remained some time after the rest of it had gone’]
How to cite this entry: "Cheshire Cat effect n." A Dictionary of Psychology. Edited by Andrew M. Colman. Oxford University Press 2009. Oxford Reference Online. Oxford University Press. 15 January 2012
Saturday, January 14, 2012
Word of the Day
Word of the Day for Saturday, January 14, 2012
desinence \DES-uh-nuhns\, noun:
1. A termination or ending, as the final line of a verse.
2. Grammar. A termination, ending, or suffix of a word.
The extreme facility with which the language lends itself to rhyming desinence has a most injurious effect upon versification. There are not verses only, but whole poems, in which each line terminates with the same desinence. -- Wentworth Webster, "Basque Legends"
But it will end, a desinence will come, or the breath fail better still, I'll be silence, I'll know I'm silence, no, in the silence you can't know, I'll never know anything. -- Samuel Beckett, "Texts for Nothing," The Complete Short Prose
Like descent, desinence is related to the Latin word dēsinere which meant "to put down or leave."
Dictionary.com Word of the Day
http://www.dictionary.com/wordoftheday/
desinence \DES-uh-nuhns\, noun:
1. A termination or ending, as the final line of a verse.
2. Grammar. A termination, ending, or suffix of a word.
The extreme facility with which the language lends itself to rhyming desinence has a most injurious effect upon versification. There are not verses only, but whole poems, in which each line terminates with the same desinence. -- Wentworth Webster, "Basque Legends"
But it will end, a desinence will come, or the breath fail better still, I'll be silence, I'll know I'm silence, no, in the silence you can't know, I'll never know anything. -- Samuel Beckett, "Texts for Nothing," The Complete Short Prose
Like descent, desinence is related to the Latin word dēsinere which meant "to put down or leave."
Dictionary.com Word of the Day
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Fact of the Day
Fact of the Day : From which language were the words pyjamas and gymkhana borrowed? (from The Oxford Dictionary of Word Origins)
Raj Language Proper pukka
Early in the 17th century Britain began to take an interest in India, and the impact of its languages on English goes back almost as far. But it was the Raj —the British colonial rule—that fixed many Indian words in the language. SOME terms were consciously borrowed. In the 18th century a wealthy man who had made his fortune in India might be called a nabob, a word that came ultimately from Urdu (a language of northern India which took many words from Persian), and was originally the name for a Muslim official under the Mogul empire.
Sahib was a polite title for a man in British India, and memsahib for a woman—sahib came via Urdu from Arabic shib ‘friend, lord’, while the mem- in memsahib was an Indian pronunciation of ma'am. Other words have become so much part of the language that it is easy to forget their Indian origin. Living in a bungalow may seem completely part of the British scene, but the first ‘bungalows’ were cottages built in Bengal for early European settlers there, and the name comes from a Hindi word meaning ‘belonging to Bengal’.
If you make out a chit for someone's expenses, you are using a term that comes from Hindi citth ‘a note or pass’. British chef Jamie Oliver gleefully introduced pukka to millions of TV viewers in the slang sense ‘excellent’, but the word was being used in India as far back as the middle of the 17th century. Its first sense was ‘of full weight’, which gradually evolved into ‘certain, reliable’ and ‘genuine, authentic’, then ‘top-quality, impeccable’, and ‘socially acceptable, well brought up’. Jamie's sense is of early 1990s vintage.
The word is from Hindi pakk, meaning ‘cooked, ripe, or substantial’. And Indian cuisine has contributed other familiar terms, including curry, from a Tamil word adopted in the late 16th century, and kedgeree, from Hindi khichri, originally a dish of rice and pulses. Things first got cushy during the First World War. It was originally an Anglo-Indian word from Urdu kushi ‘pleasure’, going back to Persian kus. As well as describing an easy job or post, cushy could also be used in connection with a wound that was not dangerous or serious. Riders have been wearing jodhpurs since the late 19th century. The word comes from Jodhpur, a city in western India where similar garments are worn by men as a part of everyday dress.
The gymkhana, a children's event with races and other competitions on horseback, is now a staple of every pony club, but in Victorian India it was a public place with facilities for sports. The English form of the word, which comes from the Urdu term gendkhna, meaning ‘racket court’, has been influenced by the spelling of gymnastic. The pyjamas we put on at night are literally ‘leg clothing’—the word is from Urdu py ‘leg’ and jma ‘clothing’. They were originally loose silk or cotton trousers that both men and women wore in such countries as Turkey, Iran, and India, until Europeans living in these places started wearing them for bed.
A man might wear a cummerbund, a kind of sash, around his waist as part of evening dress for a smart party, but it was first worn in the Indian subcontinent by domestic staff and office workers of low status. The word is from Urdu kamar-band, from kamar ‘waist or groin’ and bandi ‘band’. Some Indian-based words may look misleadingly as though they come from familiar English words.
Shampoo, for example, has nothing to do with sham, or with poo. English speakers first came across the term in the 18th century in Turkish baths, where the original use was ‘to give a massage to’. The word itself is from Hindi cmpo!, an instruction to a masseur to ‘press!’. The 1930s slang word of approval, tickety-boo, has no association with tick or ticket, but probably comes from a Hindi expression thk hai ‘all right’.
The British rule of India as a Crown possession from 1858 to 1947 is known as the Raj, from the Hindi word rj ‘reign’. The Raj itself has long since passed into history, but the term is still with us. Evidence of its lasting impact on the language came in 2005, when the journalist Jeremy Paxman reached for it to describe the number of Scottish politicians at Westminster. ‘We live’, he said, ‘under a sort of Scottish Raj.’ See also horde, Indian, juggernaut, jungle, loot, thug, vindaloo
How to cite this entry: "Raj Language" Oxford Dictionary of Word Origins. by Julia Cresswell. Oxford Reference Online. Oxford University Press. 14 January 2012
Raj Language Proper pukka
Early in the 17th century Britain began to take an interest in India, and the impact of its languages on English goes back almost as far. But it was the Raj —the British colonial rule—that fixed many Indian words in the language. SOME terms were consciously borrowed. In the 18th century a wealthy man who had made his fortune in India might be called a nabob, a word that came ultimately from Urdu (a language of northern India which took many words from Persian), and was originally the name for a Muslim official under the Mogul empire.
Sahib was a polite title for a man in British India, and memsahib for a woman—sahib came via Urdu from Arabic shib ‘friend, lord’, while the mem- in memsahib was an Indian pronunciation of ma'am. Other words have become so much part of the language that it is easy to forget their Indian origin. Living in a bungalow may seem completely part of the British scene, but the first ‘bungalows’ were cottages built in Bengal for early European settlers there, and the name comes from a Hindi word meaning ‘belonging to Bengal’.
If you make out a chit for someone's expenses, you are using a term that comes from Hindi citth ‘a note or pass’. British chef Jamie Oliver gleefully introduced pukka to millions of TV viewers in the slang sense ‘excellent’, but the word was being used in India as far back as the middle of the 17th century. Its first sense was ‘of full weight’, which gradually evolved into ‘certain, reliable’ and ‘genuine, authentic’, then ‘top-quality, impeccable’, and ‘socially acceptable, well brought up’. Jamie's sense is of early 1990s vintage.
The word is from Hindi pakk, meaning ‘cooked, ripe, or substantial’. And Indian cuisine has contributed other familiar terms, including curry, from a Tamil word adopted in the late 16th century, and kedgeree, from Hindi khichri, originally a dish of rice and pulses. Things first got cushy during the First World War. It was originally an Anglo-Indian word from Urdu kushi ‘pleasure’, going back to Persian kus. As well as describing an easy job or post, cushy could also be used in connection with a wound that was not dangerous or serious. Riders have been wearing jodhpurs since the late 19th century. The word comes from Jodhpur, a city in western India where similar garments are worn by men as a part of everyday dress.
The gymkhana, a children's event with races and other competitions on horseback, is now a staple of every pony club, but in Victorian India it was a public place with facilities for sports. The English form of the word, which comes from the Urdu term gendkhna, meaning ‘racket court’, has been influenced by the spelling of gymnastic. The pyjamas we put on at night are literally ‘leg clothing’—the word is from Urdu py ‘leg’ and jma ‘clothing’. They were originally loose silk or cotton trousers that both men and women wore in such countries as Turkey, Iran, and India, until Europeans living in these places started wearing them for bed.
A man might wear a cummerbund, a kind of sash, around his waist as part of evening dress for a smart party, but it was first worn in the Indian subcontinent by domestic staff and office workers of low status. The word is from Urdu kamar-band, from kamar ‘waist or groin’ and bandi ‘band’. Some Indian-based words may look misleadingly as though they come from familiar English words.
Shampoo, for example, has nothing to do with sham, or with poo. English speakers first came across the term in the 18th century in Turkish baths, where the original use was ‘to give a massage to’. The word itself is from Hindi cmpo!, an instruction to a masseur to ‘press!’. The 1930s slang word of approval, tickety-boo, has no association with tick or ticket, but probably comes from a Hindi expression thk hai ‘all right’.
The British rule of India as a Crown possession from 1858 to 1947 is known as the Raj, from the Hindi word rj ‘reign’. The Raj itself has long since passed into history, but the term is still with us. Evidence of its lasting impact on the language came in 2005, when the journalist Jeremy Paxman reached for it to describe the number of Scottish politicians at Westminster. ‘We live’, he said, ‘under a sort of Scottish Raj.’ See also horde, Indian, juggernaut, jungle, loot, thug, vindaloo
How to cite this entry: "Raj Language" Oxford Dictionary of Word Origins. by Julia Cresswell. Oxford Reference Online. Oxford University Press. 14 January 2012
Friday, January 13, 2012
Word of the Day
Word of the Day for Friday, January 13, 2012
viscid \VIS-id\, adjective:
1. Having a glutinous consistency; sticky; adhesive.
2. Botany. Covered by a sticky substance.
This was the moment for the curious, shading their faces from the fiery glow, to plunge their walking-sticks into the viscid mass and dip out portions of the lava. -- T. M. Coan, "An Island of Fire," Scribner's Monthly
But now a snake commenced to coil around my feet, and with a momentary terror I rushed forward, only to strike a rock and fall into a viscid pool. -- Will L. Garver, "Brother of the Third Degree"
Viscid comes from the Latin word for mistletoe, visc. Mistletoe was used to make a sticky paste to trap birds called birdlime. It is clearly also related to the word "viscous."
Dictionary.com Word of the Day
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viscid \VIS-id\, adjective:
1. Having a glutinous consistency; sticky; adhesive.
2. Botany. Covered by a sticky substance.
This was the moment for the curious, shading their faces from the fiery glow, to plunge their walking-sticks into the viscid mass and dip out portions of the lava. -- T. M. Coan, "An Island of Fire," Scribner's Monthly
But now a snake commenced to coil around my feet, and with a momentary terror I rushed forward, only to strike a rock and fall into a viscid pool. -- Will L. Garver, "Brother of the Third Degree"
Viscid comes from the Latin word for mistletoe, visc. Mistletoe was used to make a sticky paste to trap birds called birdlime. It is clearly also related to the word "viscous."
Dictionary.com Word of the Day
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Book Review: The Greater Journey
New to the Yocum Library Collection
General Collection DC718.A44 M39 2011
General Collection DC718.A44 M39 2011
Thursday, January 12, 2012
Word of the Day
Word of the Day for Thursday, January 12, 2012
bonny \BON-ee\, adjective:
1. Pleasing to the eye.
2. British Dialect.
A. (Of people) Healthy, sweet, and lively.
B. (Of places) Placid; tranquil.
C. Pleasing; agreeable; good.
adverb:
1. British Dialect. Pleasingly; agreeably; very well.
noun:
1. Scot. and North England Archaic.
A pretty girl or young woman. Mayhap 'tis time to speak of more than how fine the weather is or how bonny she looks. -- Hannah Howell, "Highland Honor"
As he was about to fix the last nail in the last of the shoes, the man in green said, "Would you be knowing what ails the bonny young lady?" -- Ethel Johnston Phelps and Pamela Baldwin-Ford, "Tatterhood and Other Tales"
Bonny is of uncertain origin. It may be related to the Old French word bon meaning "good." It entered the Scots dialect in the mid-1400s.
Dictionary.com Word of the Day
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bonny \BON-ee\, adjective:
1. Pleasing to the eye.
2. British Dialect.
A. (Of people) Healthy, sweet, and lively.
B. (Of places) Placid; tranquil.
C. Pleasing; agreeable; good.
adverb:
1. British Dialect. Pleasingly; agreeably; very well.
noun:
1. Scot. and North England Archaic.
A pretty girl or young woman. Mayhap 'tis time to speak of more than how fine the weather is or how bonny she looks. -- Hannah Howell, "Highland Honor"
As he was about to fix the last nail in the last of the shoes, the man in green said, "Would you be knowing what ails the bonny young lady?" -- Ethel Johnston Phelps and Pamela Baldwin-Ford, "Tatterhood and Other Tales"
Bonny is of uncertain origin. It may be related to the Old French word bon meaning "good." It entered the Scots dialect in the mid-1400s.
Dictionary.com Word of the Day
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Fact of the Day
Fact of the Day : In meteorology what is a Dansgaard-Oeschger event? (from A Dictionary of Weather)
Dansgaard–Oeschger event A period of extremely rapid temperature change (increases of 10 deg C or more) that occurred during the last ice age. Strictly speaking, our knowledge of these events is confined to Greenland, where 23 have been identified by the oxygen-isotope method from deep ice cores, and where they are correlated with snow deposition rates.
The ice cores show, however, that the events also coincide with large changes in methane concentrations and dust deposition rates, which probably relate to conditions in tropical wetlands and in eastern Asia, respectively. These imply major climatic changes throughout the northern hemisphere. See also Heinrich event.
How to cite this entry: "Dansgaard–Oeschger event" A Dictionary of Weather. Storm Dunlop. Oxford University Press, 2008.Oxford Reference Online. Oxford University Press. 12 January 2012
Dansgaard–Oeschger event A period of extremely rapid temperature change (increases of 10 deg C or more) that occurred during the last ice age. Strictly speaking, our knowledge of these events is confined to Greenland, where 23 have been identified by the oxygen-isotope method from deep ice cores, and where they are correlated with snow deposition rates.
The ice cores show, however, that the events also coincide with large changes in methane concentrations and dust deposition rates, which probably relate to conditions in tropical wetlands and in eastern Asia, respectively. These imply major climatic changes throughout the northern hemisphere. See also Heinrich event.
How to cite this entry: "Dansgaard–Oeschger event" A Dictionary of Weather. Storm Dunlop. Oxford University Press, 2008.Oxford Reference Online. Oxford University Press. 12 January 2012
Wednesday, January 11, 2012
Word of the Day
Word of the Day for Wednesday, January 11, 2012
expostulate \ik-SPOS-chuh-leyt\, verb:
To reason earnestly with someone against something that person intends to do or has done.
The tears would run plentifully down my face when I made these reflections; and sometimes I would expostulate with myself, why Providence should thus completely ruin his creatures, and render them so absolutely miserable, so without help abandoned, so entirely depressed, that it could hardly be rational to be thankful for such a life. -- Daniel Defoe, "Robinson Crusoe"
Peter at last determined one day, all of a sudden, that he would step into this highland reaver's den, and expostulate with him on the baseness and impolicy of his conduct, and try to convince him of these, and persuade him to keep his own laird's bounds. -- James Hogg, "Tales of the Wars of Montrose"
Expostulate is derived from the Latin word expostulātus which meant "demanded urgently or required."
Dictionary.com Word of the Day
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expostulate \ik-SPOS-chuh-leyt\, verb:
To reason earnestly with someone against something that person intends to do or has done.
The tears would run plentifully down my face when I made these reflections; and sometimes I would expostulate with myself, why Providence should thus completely ruin his creatures, and render them so absolutely miserable, so without help abandoned, so entirely depressed, that it could hardly be rational to be thankful for such a life. -- Daniel Defoe, "Robinson Crusoe"
Peter at last determined one day, all of a sudden, that he would step into this highland reaver's den, and expostulate with him on the baseness and impolicy of his conduct, and try to convince him of these, and persuade him to keep his own laird's bounds. -- James Hogg, "Tales of the Wars of Montrose"
Expostulate is derived from the Latin word expostulātus which meant "demanded urgently or required."
Dictionary.com Word of the Day
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Fact of the Day
Fact of the Day : What is a gorblimey? (from Brewer's Dictionary of Modern Phrase & Fable)
Gorblimey. A rakish hat, as supposedly worn by a Cockney or anyone prone to exclaiming ‘gorblimey’, as a slurring of ‘God blind me’. (‘Blimey’ is a short form of this.) The hat so named evolved in the early years of the 20th century as a type of unconventional military headgear in the form of a floppy field-service cap.
Gorblimey trousers were in similar style, and both terms were directly inspired by a ribald Liverpool folk ditty, ‘My Old Man's a Fireman on the Elder-Dempster Line’, which had the couplet, ‘He wears Gorblimey trousers/An a little gorblimey 'at’. This same song was adapted by Lonnie Donegan for his Number 1 hit, ‘My Old Man's a Dustman’ (1960), which again popularized the garments.
How to cite this entry: "Gorblimey" Brewer's Dictionary of Modern Phrase & Fable. Edited by John Ayto and Ian Crofton. Chambers Harrap Publishers Ltd. 11 January 2012
Gorblimey. A rakish hat, as supposedly worn by a Cockney or anyone prone to exclaiming ‘gorblimey’, as a slurring of ‘God blind me’. (‘Blimey’ is a short form of this.) The hat so named evolved in the early years of the 20th century as a type of unconventional military headgear in the form of a floppy field-service cap.
Gorblimey trousers were in similar style, and both terms were directly inspired by a ribald Liverpool folk ditty, ‘My Old Man's a Fireman on the Elder-Dempster Line’, which had the couplet, ‘He wears Gorblimey trousers/An a little gorblimey 'at’. This same song was adapted by Lonnie Donegan for his Number 1 hit, ‘My Old Man's a Dustman’ (1960), which again popularized the garments.
How to cite this entry: "Gorblimey" Brewer's Dictionary of Modern Phrase & Fable. Edited by John Ayto and Ian Crofton. Chambers Harrap Publishers Ltd. 11 January 2012
Tuesday, January 10, 2012
Word of the Day
Word of the Day for Tuesday, January 10, 2012
paregmenon \puh-REG-muh-non\, noun:
The juxtaposition of words that have a common derivation, as in “sense and sensibility.”
Although as artificial as his use of traductio, this use of paregmenon at least reveals Sidney's ingenuity and wit. -- Sherod M. Cooper, 'The Sonnets of Astrophel and Stella"
The recurrence of the same word with a different inflection, as in the polyptoton, or of different words of the same origin, as in the paregmenon, draws attention to the word thus recurring, and adds somewhat to its logical worth. -- Josiah Willard Gibbs, "Philological Studies with English Illustrations"
Paregmenon comes from the Greek word parēēgménon meaning "to bring side by side or derive."
Dictionary.com Word of the Day
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paregmenon \puh-REG-muh-non\, noun:
The juxtaposition of words that have a common derivation, as in “sense and sensibility.”
Although as artificial as his use of traductio, this use of paregmenon at least reveals Sidney's ingenuity and wit. -- Sherod M. Cooper, 'The Sonnets of Astrophel and Stella"
The recurrence of the same word with a different inflection, as in the polyptoton, or of different words of the same origin, as in the paregmenon, draws attention to the word thus recurring, and adds somewhat to its logical worth. -- Josiah Willard Gibbs, "Philological Studies with English Illustrations"
Paregmenon comes from the Greek word parēēgménon meaning "to bring side by side or derive."
Dictionary.com Word of the Day
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Fact of the Day
Fact of the Day : What award was given to Adolf Hitler during World War I? (from The Oxford Companion to the Politics of the World )
Hitler, Adolf. Probably no leader in world history has been so despised, adulated, and feared as Adolf Hitler. His responsibility for endless human suffering and vast numbers of deaths is rivaled only by Stalin. During the twelve years of the Third Reich his charismatic sway enthralled millions of Germans who listened raptly to his words and followed his leadership to the very end. At the height of his power in 1942 he dominated almost all of Europe and western Russia while his armies and Schutzstaffel (SS) units moved from conquest to conquest.
To the present time he is virtually the only historical figure whose malignant notoriety has not been subject to significant revisionist interpretations. The meteoric rise of Adolf Hitler presents an exception to Newton's principle that no effect can be greater than its cause. He was a man who came out of nowhere. Until the age of thirty he showed no evidence of superior talents, no disciplined work habits, and no capacity for stable relationships.
He had little education and few coherent ideas. Before he came to power in 1933, most dismissed him as an eccentric nonentity or an unreliable extremist. Finally, he was not even a German. Hitler was born in 1889 at Braunau am Inn in Austria. The son of an Austrian customs official, Alois Schickelgruber Hitler, and his third wife, Klara, who came from a peasant background, Hitler was a sullen, rebellious child. The early conflicts with his authoritarian father were soothed by his indulgent mother. When she died of cancer in 1908 he lost an anchor in the stormy seas of his adolescence.
By that time he had already abandoned the Catholic church and any pretensions to middle-class respectability. From 1907 to 1913 he lived a vagrant life in Vienna. Rejected twice by the Academy of Fine Arts, he drifted aimlessly, taking odd jobs and hawking his own sketches on streets and in taverns.
Although he claimed impoverishment, it was really self-imposed; he received orphan's benefits from the state and could have lived comfortably if he had wished. During this period Hitler picked up his basic political ideas, most of them from the seamy netherworld of lower-class Vienna. They included crackpot Aryan racism with a fanatic preoccupation with “purity of blood,” a stereotypical antisemitism set forth in violent sexual imagery, and a polyglot list of enemies: Marxism, capitalism, democracy, pacifism, the stock exchange, and the press. Suffusing all of these ideas was the dream of a Greater Germany.
Continued..
http://www.oxfordreference.com/pub/views/fact-of-the-day.html?date=2012-01-10
How to cite this entry: Richard M. Hunt "Hitler, Adolf" The Oxford Companion to the Politics of the World, 2e. Joel Krieger, ed. Oxford University Press Inc. 2001. Oxford Reference Online. Oxford University Press. 10 January 2012
Hitler, Adolf. Probably no leader in world history has been so despised, adulated, and feared as Adolf Hitler. His responsibility for endless human suffering and vast numbers of deaths is rivaled only by Stalin. During the twelve years of the Third Reich his charismatic sway enthralled millions of Germans who listened raptly to his words and followed his leadership to the very end. At the height of his power in 1942 he dominated almost all of Europe and western Russia while his armies and Schutzstaffel (SS) units moved from conquest to conquest.
To the present time he is virtually the only historical figure whose malignant notoriety has not been subject to significant revisionist interpretations. The meteoric rise of Adolf Hitler presents an exception to Newton's principle that no effect can be greater than its cause. He was a man who came out of nowhere. Until the age of thirty he showed no evidence of superior talents, no disciplined work habits, and no capacity for stable relationships.
He had little education and few coherent ideas. Before he came to power in 1933, most dismissed him as an eccentric nonentity or an unreliable extremist. Finally, he was not even a German. Hitler was born in 1889 at Braunau am Inn in Austria. The son of an Austrian customs official, Alois Schickelgruber Hitler, and his third wife, Klara, who came from a peasant background, Hitler was a sullen, rebellious child. The early conflicts with his authoritarian father were soothed by his indulgent mother. When she died of cancer in 1908 he lost an anchor in the stormy seas of his adolescence.
By that time he had already abandoned the Catholic church and any pretensions to middle-class respectability. From 1907 to 1913 he lived a vagrant life in Vienna. Rejected twice by the Academy of Fine Arts, he drifted aimlessly, taking odd jobs and hawking his own sketches on streets and in taverns.
Although he claimed impoverishment, it was really self-imposed; he received orphan's benefits from the state and could have lived comfortably if he had wished. During this period Hitler picked up his basic political ideas, most of them from the seamy netherworld of lower-class Vienna. They included crackpot Aryan racism with a fanatic preoccupation with “purity of blood,” a stereotypical antisemitism set forth in violent sexual imagery, and a polyglot list of enemies: Marxism, capitalism, democracy, pacifism, the stock exchange, and the press. Suffusing all of these ideas was the dream of a Greater Germany.
Continued..
http://www.oxfordreference.com/pub/views/fact-of-the-day.html?date=2012-01-10
How to cite this entry: Richard M. Hunt "Hitler, Adolf" The Oxford Companion to the Politics of the World, 2e. Joel Krieger, ed. Oxford University Press Inc. 2001. Oxford Reference Online. Oxford University Press. 10 January 2012
Monday, January 9, 2012
Word of the Day
Word of the Day for Monday, January 9, 2012
heterotelic \het-er-uh-TEL-ik\, adjective:
Having the purpose of its existence or occurrence apart from itself.
You're of heteroteleic value, that means you were invoked for an extraneous purpose alone, the outcome of which won't even be known to me until I'm back with my physical body in the physical world… -- William Cook, "Love in the Time of Flowers"
Therefore, what has been proposed above as a means of redirecting the development of postmodernity toward more livable, human dimensions is a heterotelic narrative transitivity—an active reimmersion of narrative in the social—which contrasts sharply with the autotelic concern for their own procedures and the hermetic intransitivity of modernist self-consciousness and late modernist self-reflexivity. -- Joseph Francese, "Narrating Postmodern Time and Space"
Heterotelic is directly derived from the Greek roots héteros meaning "other", tele- meaning "distant", and the suffix -ic which denotes an adjective, as in metallic and athletic.
Dictionary.com Word of the Day
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heterotelic \het-er-uh-TEL-ik\, adjective:
Having the purpose of its existence or occurrence apart from itself.
You're of heteroteleic value, that means you were invoked for an extraneous purpose alone, the outcome of which won't even be known to me until I'm back with my physical body in the physical world… -- William Cook, "Love in the Time of Flowers"
Therefore, what has been proposed above as a means of redirecting the development of postmodernity toward more livable, human dimensions is a heterotelic narrative transitivity—an active reimmersion of narrative in the social—which contrasts sharply with the autotelic concern for their own procedures and the hermetic intransitivity of modernist self-consciousness and late modernist self-reflexivity. -- Joseph Francese, "Narrating Postmodern Time and Space"
Heterotelic is directly derived from the Greek roots héteros meaning "other", tele- meaning "distant", and the suffix -ic which denotes an adjective, as in metallic and athletic.
Dictionary.com Word of the Day
http://www.dictionary.com/wordoftheday/
From the Desk of Valerie Schaeffer - Charity Navigator
Charity Navigator
In hard economic times, it’s important to know how every penny is spent. Charitable giving is no exception. When you give to a charity, you want to know exactly how well the charity uses your money and where it goes. If you want to find out how your money is used, check out Charity Navigator (http://www.charitynavigator.org/)
According to its website, Charity Navigator “has become the nation’s largest and most-utilized evaluator of charities.” Founded in 2001, Charity Navigator is a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization that rates over 5,000 charities in the United States. Charity Navigator rates charities in two areas: how the charity handles daily responsibilities and also its potential of long-term health. With these to areas assessed, Charity Navigator gives each charity a rating of zero to four stars.
When you search for a charity, you will be shown current rating with organizational efficiency and capacity for growth. In addition, revenue and expenses are listed for the previous year. You will see the contact information for the charity, including email and website information.
Also, the current executive director and his or her compensation are listed, along with what percentage of the expenses that compensation takes. This is an important factor. For example, a director’s salary of $100,000 may seem high, but if it’s it only one percent of expenses, that’s a good sign that your money will go towards charitable programs.
In contrast, if a director makes $100,000 and that salary is 30% of expenses, there’s a good chance your donation may be going towards the take-home pay of the director. That’s no necessarily a bad thing, as long as you know that possibility exists and you can make better choices in donating money.
In addition to rating charities, Charity Navigator also includes articles, tips and studies in the area of philanthropy (charitable giving). Plus, Charity Navigator includes top ten lists of various charities. Some examples of top ten lists include the top ten most requested charities, the top ten charities drowning in administrative costs, and the top ten charities regularly in debt.
Charity Navigator also maintains a blog and a list of Hot Topics, which are current issues in philanthropy, such as giving during an economic recession and a holiday gift giving guide.
You can register for free and log in to maintain a list of your own charities you are supporting or interested in supporting. You can also comment on a charity’s rating and/or performance.
In addition, you can donate money to Charitable Navigator (remember, they too are a non-profit). To keep informed, you can sign up for the site’s monthly e-newsletter and follow it on Facebook and Twitter.
To check out Charity Navigator, go to http://www.charitynavigator.org/
Fact of the Day
Fact of the Day : Who invented the hovercraft? (from A Dictionary of Scientists )
Cockerell, Sir Christopher Sydney (1910–1999) British engineer and inventor Cockerell was born in Cambridge and educated at Cambridge University, graduating in engineering in 1931. Initially he joined a small engineering firm, then returned to Cambridge to study electronics, and in 1935 he joined the Marconi Company as an electronics engineer.
Here he worked on the development of airborne navigational equipment and on radar. In 1950 he left Marconi to set up his own boat-hire business on the Norfolk broads. As an amateur yachtsman, Cockerell was interested in the effect of water drag on the hull of a boat. He had the idea of raising the boat above the water on a cushion of air. In 1954 he performed a crucial experiment using kitchen scales, tin cans, and a vacuum cleaner to show that a properly directed stream of air could produce the required lift.
The next year he built a working model out of balsa wood, powered by a model-aircraft engine. He was granted a patent on his idea in 1955 and in 1957 the Ministry of Supply commissioned a full-size craft from the company Saunders Roe. The first prototype, SR-N1, weighed 7 tons and was capable of 60 knots. It crossed the English Channel in 1959 (with Cockerell aboard). Hovercraft entered regular cross-channel service in 1968. Cockerell was a consultant to Hovercraft Development Ltd. until 1979. He was also interested in the development of wave-power generators.
How to cite this entry: "Cockerell, Sir Christopher Sydney" A Dictionary of Scientists. Oxford University Press, 1999. Oxford Reference Online. Oxford University Press. 9 January 2012
Cockerell, Sir Christopher Sydney (1910–1999) British engineer and inventor Cockerell was born in Cambridge and educated at Cambridge University, graduating in engineering in 1931. Initially he joined a small engineering firm, then returned to Cambridge to study electronics, and in 1935 he joined the Marconi Company as an electronics engineer.
Here he worked on the development of airborne navigational equipment and on radar. In 1950 he left Marconi to set up his own boat-hire business on the Norfolk broads. As an amateur yachtsman, Cockerell was interested in the effect of water drag on the hull of a boat. He had the idea of raising the boat above the water on a cushion of air. In 1954 he performed a crucial experiment using kitchen scales, tin cans, and a vacuum cleaner to show that a properly directed stream of air could produce the required lift.
The next year he built a working model out of balsa wood, powered by a model-aircraft engine. He was granted a patent on his idea in 1955 and in 1957 the Ministry of Supply commissioned a full-size craft from the company Saunders Roe. The first prototype, SR-N1, weighed 7 tons and was capable of 60 knots. It crossed the English Channel in 1959 (with Cockerell aboard). Hovercraft entered regular cross-channel service in 1968. Cockerell was a consultant to Hovercraft Development Ltd. until 1979. He was also interested in the development of wave-power generators.
How to cite this entry: "Cockerell, Sir Christopher Sydney" A Dictionary of Scientists. Oxford University Press, 1999. Oxford Reference Online. Oxford University Press. 9 January 2012
Sunday, January 8, 2012
Word of the Day
Word of the Day for Sunday, January 8, 2012
profligacy \PROF-li-guh-see\, noun:
1. Reckless extravagance.
2. Shameless dissoluteness.
3. Great abundance.
The extravagance and general profligacy which he scrupled not to lay at Mr. Wickham's charge, exceedingly shocked her; the more so, as she could bring no proof of its injustice. -- Jane Austen, "Pride and Prejudice"
The profligacy of a man of fashion is looked upon with much less contempt and aversion, than that of a man of meaner condition. -- Adam Smith, "The Theory of Moral Sentiments"
Profligacy comes from the Latin word prōflīgātus which meant "broken down in character or degraded."
Dictionary.com Word of the Day
http://www.dictionary.com/wordoftheday/
profligacy \PROF-li-guh-see\, noun:
1. Reckless extravagance.
2. Shameless dissoluteness.
3. Great abundance.
The extravagance and general profligacy which he scrupled not to lay at Mr. Wickham's charge, exceedingly shocked her; the more so, as she could bring no proof of its injustice. -- Jane Austen, "Pride and Prejudice"
The profligacy of a man of fashion is looked upon with much less contempt and aversion, than that of a man of meaner condition. -- Adam Smith, "The Theory of Moral Sentiments"
Profligacy comes from the Latin word prōflīgātus which meant "broken down in character or degraded."
Dictionary.com Word of the Day
http://www.dictionary.com/wordoftheday/
Library Hours: 2012 January Session
Tuesday, January 3 through Thursday, January 19
Days Hours
Sunday CLOSED
Monday 8:00am - 7:00pm
Tuesday 8:00am - 7:00pm
Wednesday 8:00am - 7:00pm
Thursday 8:00am - 7:00pm
Friday 8:00am - 5:00pm
Saturday 9:00am - 12:00pm
Closed
Days Hours
Sunday CLOSED
Monday 8:00am - 7:00pm
Tuesday 8:00am - 7:00pm
Wednesday 8:00am - 7:00pm
Thursday 8:00am - 7:00pm
Friday 8:00am - 5:00pm
Saturday 9:00am - 12:00pm
Closed
Martin Luther King Holiday -- January 16
Saturday, January 7, 2012
Word of the Day
Word of the Day for Saturday, January 7, 2012
Cimmerian \si-MEER-ee-uhn\, adjective:
1. Very dark; gloomy; deep.
2. Classical Mythology. Of, pertaining to, or suggestive of a western people believed to dwell in perpetual darkness.
I was ripe for death, and along a road full of dangers, weakness led me to the boundaries of the world and the Cimmerian land of darkness and whirlwinds. -- Arthur Rimbaud, "A Season in Hell"
Once beneath the over-arching trees all was again Cimmerian darkness, nor was the gloom relieved until the sun finally arose beyond the eastern cliffs, when she saw that they were following what appeared to be a broad and well-beaten game trail through a forest of great trees. -- Edgar Rice Burroughs, "Tarzan the Untamed"
Like gasconade, cimmerian was originally a toponym. It referred to the Cimmerii, an ancient nomadic people who live in Crimea, according to Herodotus.
Dictionary.com Word of the Day
http://www.dictionary.com/wordoftheday/
Cimmerian \si-MEER-ee-uhn\, adjective:
1. Very dark; gloomy; deep.
2. Classical Mythology. Of, pertaining to, or suggestive of a western people believed to dwell in perpetual darkness.
I was ripe for death, and along a road full of dangers, weakness led me to the boundaries of the world and the Cimmerian land of darkness and whirlwinds. -- Arthur Rimbaud, "A Season in Hell"
Once beneath the over-arching trees all was again Cimmerian darkness, nor was the gloom relieved until the sun finally arose beyond the eastern cliffs, when she saw that they were following what appeared to be a broad and well-beaten game trail through a forest of great trees. -- Edgar Rice Burroughs, "Tarzan the Untamed"
Like gasconade, cimmerian was originally a toponym. It referred to the Cimmerii, an ancient nomadic people who live in Crimea, according to Herodotus.
Dictionary.com Word of the Day
http://www.dictionary.com/wordoftheday/
Fact of the Day
Fact of the Day : What is the 'dance of the bees' as described by zoologist Karl von Frisch? (from Who's Who in the Twentieth Century)
Frisch, Karl von ( 1886 – 1982 ) Austrian zoologist whose studies of animal communication contributed greatly to the founding of ethology as a distinct discipline. In recognition of this he was awarded the 1973 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine (with Konrad Lorenz and Niko Tinbergen ). Born in Vienna, the son of a surgeon, Frisch was a keen amateur naturalist in his youth. In 1905 he enrolled at Vienna University to study medicine but transferred to the Zoological Institute, Munich.
Here he undertook many field trips and worked periodically at the Trieste Marine Research Institute, studying light perception in minnows. He obtained his PhD from Vienna University in 1910 and returned to the Munich Institute to teach and continue research on colour perception in fish. In 1912 he joined the University of Munich as a lecturer. Here he showed that bees could distinguish colour but further studies were curtailed by the outbreak of war. In 1919 , after working in a Vienna hospital during World War I, he returned to Munich as an assistant professor in the Zoological Institute.
Von Frisch discovered how bees returning to the hive from foraging trips can communicate to other members of the hive the direction and distance of a food source by a pattern of movements and tail wagging – the famous ‘dance of the bees’. This formed the basis of his classic work Aus dem Leben der Bienen ( 1927 ; translated as The Dancing Bees, 1955 ). Von Frisch held posts at the universities of Rostock ( 1921 – 23 ) and Breslau ( 1923 – 25 ) before returning to Munich as director of the Zoological Institute.
Apart from four years at Graz University ( 1946 – 50 ), he remained at Munich until his retirement in 1958 . Von Frisch's other works include Bees, Their Vision, Chemical Sense, and Language ( 1950 ), which explains how bees navigate using the sun together with an internal biological clock as compass, and Tanzsprache und Orientienung der Bienen ( 1965 ; translated as The Dance Language and Orientation of Bees, 1967 ), which elaborates details of the dance movements and relates how they are inherited rather than learnt.
How to cite this entry: "Frisch, Karl von" Who's Who in the Twentieth Century. Oxford University Press, 1999. Oxford Reference Online. Oxford University Press. 7 January 2012
Frisch, Karl von ( 1886 – 1982 ) Austrian zoologist whose studies of animal communication contributed greatly to the founding of ethology as a distinct discipline. In recognition of this he was awarded the 1973 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine (with Konrad Lorenz and Niko Tinbergen ). Born in Vienna, the son of a surgeon, Frisch was a keen amateur naturalist in his youth. In 1905 he enrolled at Vienna University to study medicine but transferred to the Zoological Institute, Munich.
Here he undertook many field trips and worked periodically at the Trieste Marine Research Institute, studying light perception in minnows. He obtained his PhD from Vienna University in 1910 and returned to the Munich Institute to teach and continue research on colour perception in fish. In 1912 he joined the University of Munich as a lecturer. Here he showed that bees could distinguish colour but further studies were curtailed by the outbreak of war. In 1919 , after working in a Vienna hospital during World War I, he returned to Munich as an assistant professor in the Zoological Institute.
Von Frisch discovered how bees returning to the hive from foraging trips can communicate to other members of the hive the direction and distance of a food source by a pattern of movements and tail wagging – the famous ‘dance of the bees’. This formed the basis of his classic work Aus dem Leben der Bienen ( 1927 ; translated as The Dancing Bees, 1955 ). Von Frisch held posts at the universities of Rostock ( 1921 – 23 ) and Breslau ( 1923 – 25 ) before returning to Munich as director of the Zoological Institute.
Apart from four years at Graz University ( 1946 – 50 ), he remained at Munich until his retirement in 1958 . Von Frisch's other works include Bees, Their Vision, Chemical Sense, and Language ( 1950 ), which explains how bees navigate using the sun together with an internal biological clock as compass, and Tanzsprache und Orientienung der Bienen ( 1965 ; translated as The Dance Language and Orientation of Bees, 1967 ), which elaborates details of the dance movements and relates how they are inherited rather than learnt.
How to cite this entry: "Frisch, Karl von" Who's Who in the Twentieth Century. Oxford University Press, 1999. Oxford Reference Online. Oxford University Press. 7 January 2012
Friday, January 6, 2012
Fact of the Day
Fact of the Day : What is the trademark material of British painter Chris Ofili? (from A Dictionary of Modern and Contemporary Art)
Ofili, Chris (1968– ) British painter of Nigerian descent, born in Manchester. He studied at Chelsea College of Art and Design and the Royal College of Art. While at the latter, Ofili won a travelling scholarship to Zimbabwe. There he discovered the material which was to be his trademark, elephant dung. This was a way of linking his art to his African heritage but it was also, at first, used as a clever marketing ploy. Stickers marked ‘elephant shit’ were placed on London street furniture and two ‘shit sales’ were held (more performance pieces than actual functioning market stalls), one in Berlin and one in Brixton market.
Ofili's brilliantly coloured paintings also employ glitter and map pins (the ones with bright plastic balls on the end) to produce patterns and spell out names. The dung, in ball form covered with resin, is both attached to the canvas and used to raise the paintings, which are not hung but rested against the wall, from the floor. The technical complexity of some of his paintings means that from a distance they can appear like a purely abstract pattern. For instance it is only on close inspection of Afrodizzia (1996) that one sees the collage of black faces with painted‐on ‘Afro’ hairstyles.
Ofili has commented on his work: ‘It's what people really want from black artists. We're the voodoo king, the voodoo queen, the witch doctor, the drug dealer, the magicien de la terre.’ Much of the debate around Ofili's work is about whether it has a critical element or simply panders to an appetite for the stereotype. For Richard Powell, his painting only underscores ‘how ineffectual and even counterproductive are many racial conventions in today's world’. Ofili was awarded the Turner Prize in 1998. See also Saatchi; Sensation.
How to cite this entry: "Ofili, Chris" A Dictionary of Modern and Contemporary Art by Ian Chilvers and John Glaves-Smith. Oxford University Press Inc. Oxford Reference Online. Oxford University Press. 6 January 2012
Ofili, Chris (1968– ) British painter of Nigerian descent, born in Manchester. He studied at Chelsea College of Art and Design and the Royal College of Art. While at the latter, Ofili won a travelling scholarship to Zimbabwe. There he discovered the material which was to be his trademark, elephant dung. This was a way of linking his art to his African heritage but it was also, at first, used as a clever marketing ploy. Stickers marked ‘elephant shit’ were placed on London street furniture and two ‘shit sales’ were held (more performance pieces than actual functioning market stalls), one in Berlin and one in Brixton market.
Ofili's brilliantly coloured paintings also employ glitter and map pins (the ones with bright plastic balls on the end) to produce patterns and spell out names. The dung, in ball form covered with resin, is both attached to the canvas and used to raise the paintings, which are not hung but rested against the wall, from the floor. The technical complexity of some of his paintings means that from a distance they can appear like a purely abstract pattern. For instance it is only on close inspection of Afrodizzia (1996) that one sees the collage of black faces with painted‐on ‘Afro’ hairstyles.
Ofili has commented on his work: ‘It's what people really want from black artists. We're the voodoo king, the voodoo queen, the witch doctor, the drug dealer, the magicien de la terre.’ Much of the debate around Ofili's work is about whether it has a critical element or simply panders to an appetite for the stereotype. For Richard Powell, his painting only underscores ‘how ineffectual and even counterproductive are many racial conventions in today's world’. Ofili was awarded the Turner Prize in 1998. See also Saatchi; Sensation.
How to cite this entry: "Ofili, Chris" A Dictionary of Modern and Contemporary Art by Ian Chilvers and John Glaves-Smith. Oxford University Press Inc. Oxford Reference Online. Oxford University Press. 6 January 2012
Word of the Day
Word of the Day for Friday, January 6, 2012
sprat \sprat\, noun:
1. A small or inconsequential person or thing.
2. A species of herring, Clupea sprattus, of the eastern North Atlantic.
How'd you get yourself into this, sprat, Bustard wanted to know. -- Gene Wolfe, Epiphany of the Long Sun Edgerton was cursing, but Mr. Bullock just shook his head. "No, sir, don't say such things in front of the little sprat…" -- Catherine Coulter, "Deception"
Sprat is a variation of the Old English word sprot which meant "a sprout or twig." Its most common usage is in the nursery rhyme "Jack Sprat."
Dictionary.com Word of the Day
http://www.dictionary.com/wordoftheday/
sprat \sprat\, noun:
1. A small or inconsequential person or thing.
2. A species of herring, Clupea sprattus, of the eastern North Atlantic.
How'd you get yourself into this, sprat, Bustard wanted to know. -- Gene Wolfe, Epiphany of the Long Sun Edgerton was cursing, but Mr. Bullock just shook his head. "No, sir, don't say such things in front of the little sprat…" -- Catherine Coulter, "Deception"
Sprat is a variation of the Old English word sprot which meant "a sprout or twig." Its most common usage is in the nursery rhyme "Jack Sprat."
Dictionary.com Word of the Day
http://www.dictionary.com/wordoftheday/
Thursday, January 5, 2012
The Yocum Library Online Databases - Project Muse
The Yocum Library Online Databases - Project Muse
Peer-reviewed humanities and social sciences journals, and full text.
Student, to access off line use WebAdvisor name and student ID#
What is Project MUSE Our Mission: Project MUSE's mission is to excel in the broad dissemination of high-quality scholarly content. Through innovation and collaborative development, Project MUSE anticipates the needs of and delivers essential resources to all members of the scholarly community.
What is Project MUSE? Project MUSE is a unique collaboration between libraries and publishers, providing 100% full-text, affordable and user-friendly online access to a comprehensive selection of prestigious humanities and social sciences journals. MUSE's online journal collections support a diverse array of research needs at academic, public, special and school libraries worldwide.
Our journals are heavily indexed and peer-reviewed, with critically acclaimed articles by the most respected scholars in their fields. MUSE is also the sole source of complete, full-text versions of titles from many of the world's leading university presses and scholarly societies. Currently, MUSE provides full-text access to current content from over 400 titles representing nearly 100 not-for-profit publishers.
MUSE began in 1993 as a pioneering joint project of the Johns Hopkins University Press and the Milton S. Eisenhower Library (MSEL) at JHU. Grants from the Mellon Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities allowed MUSE to go live with JHU Press journals in 1995. Journals from other publishers were first incorporated in 2000, with additional publishers joining in each subsequent year.
Today, MUSE is still a not-for-profit collaboration between the participating publishers and MSEL, with the goal of disseminating quality scholarship via a sustainable model that meets the needs of both libraries and publishers. At this time, Project MUSE subscriptions are available only to institutions.
Peer-reviewed humanities and social sciences journals, and full text.
Student, to access off line use WebAdvisor name and student ID#
What is Project MUSE Our Mission: Project MUSE's mission is to excel in the broad dissemination of high-quality scholarly content. Through innovation and collaborative development, Project MUSE anticipates the needs of and delivers essential resources to all members of the scholarly community.
What is Project MUSE? Project MUSE is a unique collaboration between libraries and publishers, providing 100% full-text, affordable and user-friendly online access to a comprehensive selection of prestigious humanities and social sciences journals. MUSE's online journal collections support a diverse array of research needs at academic, public, special and school libraries worldwide.
Our journals are heavily indexed and peer-reviewed, with critically acclaimed articles by the most respected scholars in their fields. MUSE is also the sole source of complete, full-text versions of titles from many of the world's leading university presses and scholarly societies. Currently, MUSE provides full-text access to current content from over 400 titles representing nearly 100 not-for-profit publishers.
MUSE began in 1993 as a pioneering joint project of the Johns Hopkins University Press and the Milton S. Eisenhower Library (MSEL) at JHU. Grants from the Mellon Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities allowed MUSE to go live with JHU Press journals in 1995. Journals from other publishers were first incorporated in 2000, with additional publishers joining in each subsequent year.
Today, MUSE is still a not-for-profit collaboration between the participating publishers and MSEL, with the goal of disseminating quality scholarship via a sustainable model that meets the needs of both libraries and publishers. At this time, Project MUSE subscriptions are available only to institutions.
Fact of the Day
Fact of the Day : In which year did the Cherokee people gain the vote as US citizens? (from A Dictionary of World History )
Cherokee A Native American people ( Plains Peoples ) who traditionally inhabited a region stretching across western Virginia and the Carolinas, eastern Kentucky and Tennessee, and northern Georgia and Alabama. Their prehistoric ancestors built ancient Etowah (Georgia), an important ceremonial centre of the eastern Mississippi cultures, visited by Hernando De Soto in his explorations of 1540 – 42 .
The Cherokee lived in towns of longhouses, and were at first easily assimilated into the expanding USA. Smallpox and other European-introduced diseases had greatly reduced their population by the 17th century, when French and English traders made contact. Conflict with White settlers moving westwards led to several wars, which reduced their lands. However, they adopted European methods of farming and government, including a bill of rights and a written constitution. The Cherokee also developed a distinct and original written language in the early 19th century, which gave rise to an indigenous literature and, later, a Cherokee-language newspaper.
The Cherokee had supported the British in 18th-century wars against the French and during the American War of Independence . American forces attacked them and by the end of the war their population and territories had been greatly reduced, so in 1827 they established the Cherokee Nation in north-west Georgia through a series of treaties with the US federal government.
The discovery of gold on their land resulted in pressure from the White settlers to encroach further onto Cherokee territory. Although their treaty rights and tribal autonomy were upheld in the Supreme Court, they fell foul of both the state authorities and Jackson's policy of removal of Native American tribes to land west of the Mississippi. In 1838 President Van Buren ordered the deportation of the remaining Cherokee to the Oklahoma Indian Territory (see Trail of Tears ). In 1906 the Cherokee finally gave up their tribal allegiance and in 1924 they gained the vote as US citizens.
How to cite this entry: "Cherokee" A Dictionary of World History. Oxford University Press, 2000. Oxford Reference Online. Oxford University Press. 5 January 2012
Cherokee A Native American people ( Plains Peoples ) who traditionally inhabited a region stretching across western Virginia and the Carolinas, eastern Kentucky and Tennessee, and northern Georgia and Alabama. Their prehistoric ancestors built ancient Etowah (Georgia), an important ceremonial centre of the eastern Mississippi cultures, visited by Hernando De Soto in his explorations of 1540 – 42 .
The Cherokee lived in towns of longhouses, and were at first easily assimilated into the expanding USA. Smallpox and other European-introduced diseases had greatly reduced their population by the 17th century, when French and English traders made contact. Conflict with White settlers moving westwards led to several wars, which reduced their lands. However, they adopted European methods of farming and government, including a bill of rights and a written constitution. The Cherokee also developed a distinct and original written language in the early 19th century, which gave rise to an indigenous literature and, later, a Cherokee-language newspaper.
The Cherokee had supported the British in 18th-century wars against the French and during the American War of Independence . American forces attacked them and by the end of the war their population and territories had been greatly reduced, so in 1827 they established the Cherokee Nation in north-west Georgia through a series of treaties with the US federal government.
The discovery of gold on their land resulted in pressure from the White settlers to encroach further onto Cherokee territory. Although their treaty rights and tribal autonomy were upheld in the Supreme Court, they fell foul of both the state authorities and Jackson's policy of removal of Native American tribes to land west of the Mississippi. In 1838 President Van Buren ordered the deportation of the remaining Cherokee to the Oklahoma Indian Territory (see Trail of Tears ). In 1906 the Cherokee finally gave up their tribal allegiance and in 1924 they gained the vote as US citizens.
How to cite this entry: "Cherokee" A Dictionary of World History. Oxford University Press, 2000. Oxford Reference Online. Oxford University Press. 5 January 2012
Word of the Day
Word of the Day for Thursday, January 5, 2012
gasconade \gas-kuh-NEYD\, noun:
1. Extravagant boasting; boastful talk.
verb:
1. To boast extravagantly; bluster.
The British officers laugh, because they are well armed and many, and Kemal's men are pitifully few, but they enjoy and admire Kemal's swashbuckling gasconade, and they let his party pass. -- Louis de Bernières, "Birds Without Wings"
The papers, barely days old, were full of boastful malarkey and gasconade, but of much more evident value when it came to information about the state of things in France, and in the local area. -- Dewey Lambdin, "Troubled Waters"
Gasconade originally referred to people who were from the Gascony region of southwest France, bordering Spain. Gascons reputedly boast and exaggerate their success, and their toponym took on a life of its own. It became common in English in the early 1700s.
Dictionary.com Word of the Day
http://www.dictionary.com/wordoftheday/
gasconade \gas-kuh-NEYD\, noun:
1. Extravagant boasting; boastful talk.
verb:
1. To boast extravagantly; bluster.
The British officers laugh, because they are well armed and many, and Kemal's men are pitifully few, but they enjoy and admire Kemal's swashbuckling gasconade, and they let his party pass. -- Louis de Bernières, "Birds Without Wings"
The papers, barely days old, were full of boastful malarkey and gasconade, but of much more evident value when it came to information about the state of things in France, and in the local area. -- Dewey Lambdin, "Troubled Waters"
Gasconade originally referred to people who were from the Gascony region of southwest France, bordering Spain. Gascons reputedly boast and exaggerate their success, and their toponym took on a life of its own. It became common in English in the early 1700s.
Dictionary.com Word of the Day
http://www.dictionary.com/wordoftheday/
Wednesday, January 4, 2012
Word of the Day
Word of the Day for Wednesday, January 4, 2012
fetial \FEE-shuhl\, adjective:
Concerned with declarations of war and treaties of peace.
When a just and rightful war was declared upon a foreign enemy—and were there any other kinds of wars?—a special fetial priest was called upon to hurl a spear from the steps of the temple over the exact top of the ancient stone pillar into the earth of Enemy Territory. -- Colleen McCullough, "The First Man in Rome"
He struck his treaties with foreign princes in the Forum, sacrificing a pig and reciting the ancient formula of the fetial priests. -- Edited by John Carew Rolfe, "Suetonius"
Fetial comes directly from the Latin word fētiālis, which referred to a member of the Roman college of priests who were representatives in disputes with foreign nations.
Dictionary.com Word of the Day
http://www.dictionary.com/wordoftheday/
fetial \FEE-shuhl\, adjective:
Concerned with declarations of war and treaties of peace.
When a just and rightful war was declared upon a foreign enemy—and were there any other kinds of wars?—a special fetial priest was called upon to hurl a spear from the steps of the temple over the exact top of the ancient stone pillar into the earth of Enemy Territory. -- Colleen McCullough, "The First Man in Rome"
He struck his treaties with foreign princes in the Forum, sacrificing a pig and reciting the ancient formula of the fetial priests. -- Edited by John Carew Rolfe, "Suetonius"
Fetial comes directly from the Latin word fētiālis, which referred to a member of the Roman college of priests who were representatives in disputes with foreign nations.
Dictionary.com Word of the Day
http://www.dictionary.com/wordoftheday/
Fact of the Day
Fact of the Day : What is the main ingredient in Vegemite? (from The Oxford Companion to Australian History)
Vegemite, a spread produced from brewer's yeast, was created by the Melbourne food manufacturer Fred Walker & Co. in 1923 to compete with the popular British product Marmite. In order to create a similar product, Walker's chemist D.P. Callister determined Marmite's chemical composition, the research for which earned him a DSc from the University of Melbourne. Walker's product, manufactured from leftover yeast from the Carlton Breweries, was named ‘Vegemite’ after a public competition for a name and promoted as a health product.
However, it was regarded as inferior to the British product, and its market-share remained small. In 1928, in an endeavour to recoup sales from Marmite, Vegemite was renamed ‘Parwill’—relying on the slogan ‘if Ma might, Pa will’—but this proved unsuccessful. A boost to sales from the inclusion of Vegemite in soldiers' rations during World War II was augmented by intense commercial promotion in the postwar period. The US company Kraft, which had become a part-owner in the 1930s, gained full control in 1950. The popular advertising jingle that Vegemite ‘put a rose in every cheek’ coincided with its growing popularity with children in the 1950s. Though unappreciated outside Australia, Vegemite has become a national institution.
Helen Doyle
How to cite this entry: Helen Doyle "Vegemite" The Oxford Companion to Australian History. Ed. Graeme Davison, John Hirst and Stuart Macintyre. Oxford University Press, 2001. Oxford Reference Online. Oxford University Press. 4 January 2012
Vegemite, a spread produced from brewer's yeast, was created by the Melbourne food manufacturer Fred Walker & Co. in 1923 to compete with the popular British product Marmite. In order to create a similar product, Walker's chemist D.P. Callister determined Marmite's chemical composition, the research for which earned him a DSc from the University of Melbourne. Walker's product, manufactured from leftover yeast from the Carlton Breweries, was named ‘Vegemite’ after a public competition for a name and promoted as a health product.
However, it was regarded as inferior to the British product, and its market-share remained small. In 1928, in an endeavour to recoup sales from Marmite, Vegemite was renamed ‘Parwill’—relying on the slogan ‘if Ma might, Pa will’—but this proved unsuccessful. A boost to sales from the inclusion of Vegemite in soldiers' rations during World War II was augmented by intense commercial promotion in the postwar period. The US company Kraft, which had become a part-owner in the 1930s, gained full control in 1950. The popular advertising jingle that Vegemite ‘put a rose in every cheek’ coincided with its growing popularity with children in the 1950s. Though unappreciated outside Australia, Vegemite has become a national institution.
Helen Doyle
How to cite this entry: Helen Doyle "Vegemite" The Oxford Companion to Australian History. Ed. Graeme Davison, John Hirst and Stuart Macintyre. Oxford University Press, 2001. Oxford Reference Online. Oxford University Press. 4 January 2012
Tuesday, January 3, 2012
Interim Session begins
Hours January 3-8
Tuesday, January 3 – 8 a.m.-7 p.m.
Wednesday, January 4 - 8 a.m.-7 p.m.
Thursday, January 5 - 8 a.m.-7 p.m.
Friday, January 6 - 8 a.m.-5 p.m.
Saturday, January 7, 9 a.m.- 12 p.m.
Sunday, January 8 Closed
Tuesday, January 3 – 8 a.m.-7 p.m.
Wednesday, January 4 - 8 a.m.-7 p.m.
Thursday, January 5 - 8 a.m.-7 p.m.
Friday, January 6 - 8 a.m.-5 p.m.
Saturday, January 7, 9 a.m.- 12 p.m.
Sunday, January 8 Closed
Fact of the Day
Fact of the Day : In cosmology what is an event horizon? (from The Oxford Companion to Cosmology)
event horizon An event horizon is a property of space-time, normally described by Albert Einstein's theory of general relativity. It separates the regions of space-time that we will be able to see (i.e. receive radiation from) from those that we never will. Event horizons arise in two main contexts, black holes and accelerating cosmological models. The black hole event horizon marks the edge of the region which, if entered, can never be left again. Its existence first became apparent in the static black hole space-times discovered by Karl Schwarzschild in 1916, but it exists also in more complicated black holes with charge or rotation.
In fact, it took around fifty years for the Schwarzschild space-time to be fully understood, through use of coordinate systems that simplified the description of the space-time. In cosmology, event horizons may or may not exist depending on the details of the model. None of the simple Friedmann cosmologies without a cosmological constant has an event horizon; even in the recollapsing case the entire Universe has become visible by the time of the big crunch. However, if the Universe is accelerating, objects far enough away from us will be receding so swiftly that their light can never reach us, even if the Universe becomes infinitely old.
This is sometimes known as the de Sitter horizon, as its simplest example is de Sitter space. A distinction between the black hole and cosmological settings is that for a black hole all observers outside the black hole infer the event horizon to be in the same place, whereas in cosmology each observer has their own distinct event horizon centred on their location. While in the classical theory of general relativity the event horizons are absolute, Stephen Hawking showed in 1975 that once quantum effects are included black holes are able to radiate energy and shrink.
The precise physical picture of what goes on is, as usual with quantum mechanics, rather unclear, but should perhaps be thought of as negative energy particles (in the sense of their negative gravitational potential energy exceeding their positive mass–energy) entering the event horizon, rather than anything leaving it. Related to this is the black hole information paradox, whereby information entering a black hole appears to be lost even though quantum mechanics insists that information is preserved. Recently, superstring theory has led to some progress in understanding this issue.
The quantum creation of inflationary perturbations can be regarded as analogous to black hole evaporation, with the cosmological event horizon taking the role of the black hole event horizon. The existence of cosmological event horizons is sometimes said to cause problems for superstring theory, which presently is only formulated properly if interacting strings can end up infinitely separated. Whether this is a genuine problem or a shortcoming of present theoretical understanding remains to be seen.
The event horizon is sometimes confused with a related concept, the particle horizon. The particle horizon is the limit to the region of the Universe that we can see at the present time, whereas the event horizon limits the regions we will be able to see at any point in our future, even if that future is infinitely long.
How to cite this entry: "event horizon" The Oxford Companion to Cosmology. Andrew Liddle and Jon Loveday. Oxford University Press 2008. Oxford Reference Online. Oxford University Press. 3 January 2012
event horizon An event horizon is a property of space-time, normally described by Albert Einstein's theory of general relativity. It separates the regions of space-time that we will be able to see (i.e. receive radiation from) from those that we never will. Event horizons arise in two main contexts, black holes and accelerating cosmological models. The black hole event horizon marks the edge of the region which, if entered, can never be left again. Its existence first became apparent in the static black hole space-times discovered by Karl Schwarzschild in 1916, but it exists also in more complicated black holes with charge or rotation.
In fact, it took around fifty years for the Schwarzschild space-time to be fully understood, through use of coordinate systems that simplified the description of the space-time. In cosmology, event horizons may or may not exist depending on the details of the model. None of the simple Friedmann cosmologies without a cosmological constant has an event horizon; even in the recollapsing case the entire Universe has become visible by the time of the big crunch. However, if the Universe is accelerating, objects far enough away from us will be receding so swiftly that their light can never reach us, even if the Universe becomes infinitely old.
This is sometimes known as the de Sitter horizon, as its simplest example is de Sitter space. A distinction between the black hole and cosmological settings is that for a black hole all observers outside the black hole infer the event horizon to be in the same place, whereas in cosmology each observer has their own distinct event horizon centred on their location. While in the classical theory of general relativity the event horizons are absolute, Stephen Hawking showed in 1975 that once quantum effects are included black holes are able to radiate energy and shrink.
The precise physical picture of what goes on is, as usual with quantum mechanics, rather unclear, but should perhaps be thought of as negative energy particles (in the sense of their negative gravitational potential energy exceeding their positive mass–energy) entering the event horizon, rather than anything leaving it. Related to this is the black hole information paradox, whereby information entering a black hole appears to be lost even though quantum mechanics insists that information is preserved. Recently, superstring theory has led to some progress in understanding this issue.
The quantum creation of inflationary perturbations can be regarded as analogous to black hole evaporation, with the cosmological event horizon taking the role of the black hole event horizon. The existence of cosmological event horizons is sometimes said to cause problems for superstring theory, which presently is only formulated properly if interacting strings can end up infinitely separated. Whether this is a genuine problem or a shortcoming of present theoretical understanding remains to be seen.
The event horizon is sometimes confused with a related concept, the particle horizon. The particle horizon is the limit to the region of the Universe that we can see at the present time, whereas the event horizon limits the regions we will be able to see at any point in our future, even if that future is infinitely long.
How to cite this entry: "event horizon" The Oxford Companion to Cosmology. Andrew Liddle and Jon Loveday. Oxford University Press 2008. Oxford Reference Online. Oxford University Press. 3 January 2012
Monday, January 2, 2012
Word of the Day
Word of the Day for Monday, January 2, 2012
truss \truhs\,
verb:
1. To tie, bind, or fasten.
2. To make fast with skewers, thread, or the like, as the wings or legs of a fowl in preparation for cooking.
3. To furnish or support with a truss or trusses.
4. To tie or secure (the body) closely or tightly; bind (often followed by up).
5. Falconry. (Of a hawk, falcon, etc.) To grasp (prey) firmly.
noun:
1. Civil Engineering, Building Trades. A. Any of various structural frames based on the geometric rigidity of the triangle and composed of straight members subject only to longitudinal compression, tension, or both: functions as a beam or cantilever to support bridges, roofs, etc. Compare complete (def. 8), incomplete (def. 3), redundant (def. 5c). B. Any of various structural frames constructed on principles other than the geometric rigidity of the triangle or deriving stability from other factors, as the rigidity of joints, the abutment of masonry, or the stiffness of beams.
2. Medicine/Medical. An apparatus consisting of a pad usually supported by a belt for maintaining a hernia in a reduced state.
3. Horticulture. A compact terminal cluster or head of flowers growing upon one stalk.
4. Nautical. A device for supporting a standing yard, having a pivot permitting the yard to swing horizontally when braced.
5. A collection of things tied together or packed in a receptacle; bundle; pack.
6. Chiefly British. A bundle of hay or straw, especially one containing about 56 pounds (25.4 kg) of old hay, 60 pounds (27.2 kg) of new hay, or 36 pounds (16.3 kg) of straw.
She showed me how to bone a fish with one pass of the knife, how to truss a turkey, change the oil in a car, do taxes. Instruction seemed to be her only method of communication as far as I was concerned. -- Ann Patchett, "The Patron Saint of Liars"
A dress like this does not require a maid to truss me and my hair requires only a brush. -- Madeline Hunter, "The Sinner"
Truss is derived from the Middle English word trussen which is a related to the Vulgar Latin word torsāre meaning "to twist, wind or wrap."
Dictionary.com Word of the Day
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truss \truhs\,
verb:
1. To tie, bind, or fasten.
2. To make fast with skewers, thread, or the like, as the wings or legs of a fowl in preparation for cooking.
3. To furnish or support with a truss or trusses.
4. To tie or secure (the body) closely or tightly; bind (often followed by up).
5. Falconry. (Of a hawk, falcon, etc.) To grasp (prey) firmly.
noun:
1. Civil Engineering, Building Trades. A. Any of various structural frames based on the geometric rigidity of the triangle and composed of straight members subject only to longitudinal compression, tension, or both: functions as a beam or cantilever to support bridges, roofs, etc. Compare complete (def. 8), incomplete (def. 3), redundant (def. 5c). B. Any of various structural frames constructed on principles other than the geometric rigidity of the triangle or deriving stability from other factors, as the rigidity of joints, the abutment of masonry, or the stiffness of beams.
2. Medicine/Medical. An apparatus consisting of a pad usually supported by a belt for maintaining a hernia in a reduced state.
3. Horticulture. A compact terminal cluster or head of flowers growing upon one stalk.
4. Nautical. A device for supporting a standing yard, having a pivot permitting the yard to swing horizontally when braced.
5. A collection of things tied together or packed in a receptacle; bundle; pack.
6. Chiefly British. A bundle of hay or straw, especially one containing about 56 pounds (25.4 kg) of old hay, 60 pounds (27.2 kg) of new hay, or 36 pounds (16.3 kg) of straw.
She showed me how to bone a fish with one pass of the knife, how to truss a turkey, change the oil in a car, do taxes. Instruction seemed to be her only method of communication as far as I was concerned. -- Ann Patchett, "The Patron Saint of Liars"
A dress like this does not require a maid to truss me and my hair requires only a brush. -- Madeline Hunter, "The Sinner"
Truss is derived from the Middle English word trussen which is a related to the Vulgar Latin word torsāre meaning "to twist, wind or wrap."
Dictionary.com Word of the Day
http://www.dictionary.com/wordoftheday/
Fact of the Day
Fact of the Day : In which year was it discovered that blood contained iron? (from The Oxford Companion to the Body)
haemoglobin Both the red badge of courage and the blue blood of the aristocrat are due to haemoglobin, the pigment that gives blood its colour. Take it away, by removing the blood cells, and the resulting plasma is a very pale yellow. Haemoglobin combines with oxygen, enabling blood to carry 70 times more than if the oxygen were simply dissolved. Animals that are physically active and larger than a pea could scarcely survive without it. ‘But for haemoglobin's existence, man might never have attained any activity which the lobster does not possess, or had he done so, it would have been with a body as minute as the fly's’ (J. Barcoft).
Haemoglobin, contained in the red cells of the blood and constituting the main site of iron in the body, is present in all vertebrate species. In the human adult it is synthesized in the developing red cells in the bone marrow. Many worms have haemoglobin, but others and also most molluscs have different and more primitive oxygen-carrying pigments, which have not survived into higher forms of evolution.
Haemoglobin not only distributes oxygen as it is required by the tissues but is also an important store of the gas. Healthy humans have about 150 g of haemoglobin per litre of blood, and this can bind with 200 ml of oxygen per litre. With the body at rest the tissues only remove about one-quarter of the available oxygen reaching them in arterial blood, the other three-quarters remaining in the venous blood returning to the lungs. This constitutes an important reserve of oxygen supply which can be called on in conditions of work and exercise. In a typical total blood volume of 5 litres, even though more than half is in the veins, we thus have about 0.75 litre of oxygen combined with haemoglobin in the blood, and we have about the same amount as gas in the lungs. If we stop breathing, for example by holding our breath, these stores will maintain the functions of the brain for at the most a few minutes — but without them brain function would cease almost immediately.
More....http://www.oxfordreference.com/pub/views/fact-of-the-day.html?date=2012-01-02
haemoglobin Both the red badge of courage and the blue blood of the aristocrat are due to haemoglobin, the pigment that gives blood its colour. Take it away, by removing the blood cells, and the resulting plasma is a very pale yellow. Haemoglobin combines with oxygen, enabling blood to carry 70 times more than if the oxygen were simply dissolved. Animals that are physically active and larger than a pea could scarcely survive without it. ‘But for haemoglobin's existence, man might never have attained any activity which the lobster does not possess, or had he done so, it would have been with a body as minute as the fly's’ (J. Barcoft).
Haemoglobin, contained in the red cells of the blood and constituting the main site of iron in the body, is present in all vertebrate species. In the human adult it is synthesized in the developing red cells in the bone marrow. Many worms have haemoglobin, but others and also most molluscs have different and more primitive oxygen-carrying pigments, which have not survived into higher forms of evolution.
Haemoglobin not only distributes oxygen as it is required by the tissues but is also an important store of the gas. Healthy humans have about 150 g of haemoglobin per litre of blood, and this can bind with 200 ml of oxygen per litre. With the body at rest the tissues only remove about one-quarter of the available oxygen reaching them in arterial blood, the other three-quarters remaining in the venous blood returning to the lungs. This constitutes an important reserve of oxygen supply which can be called on in conditions of work and exercise. In a typical total blood volume of 5 litres, even though more than half is in the veins, we thus have about 0.75 litre of oxygen combined with haemoglobin in the blood, and we have about the same amount as gas in the lungs. If we stop breathing, for example by holding our breath, these stores will maintain the functions of the brain for at the most a few minutes — but without them brain function would cease almost immediately.
More....http://www.oxfordreference.com/pub/views/fact-of-the-day.html?date=2012-01-02
Sunday, January 1, 2012
Word of the Day
Word of the Day for Sunday, January 1, 2012
novation \noh-VEY-shuhn\, noun:
1. The introduction of something new; innovation.
2. Law. The substitution of a new obligation for an old one, usually by the substitution of a new debtor or of a new creditor.
Everything seems to suggest that his discourse proceeds according to a two-term dialectic: popular opinion and its contrary, Doxa and paradox, the stereotype and the novation, fatigue and freshness, relish and disgust: I like/I don't like. -- Roland Barthes, "Roland Barthes"
The Text is a little like a score of this new kind: it solicits from the reader a practical collaboration. A great novation this, for who executes the work? -- Edited by Dorothy Hale, "The Novel: An Anthology of Criticism and Theory 1900-2000"
Novation comes directly from the Latin word novātiōn which meant "a renewing." Its roots are novāre which means "to renew" and the suffix -ion which denotes an action, as in creation or fusion.
Dictionary.com Word of the Day
http://www.dictionary.com/wordoftheday/
novation \noh-VEY-shuhn\, noun:
1. The introduction of something new; innovation.
2. Law. The substitution of a new obligation for an old one, usually by the substitution of a new debtor or of a new creditor.
Everything seems to suggest that his discourse proceeds according to a two-term dialectic: popular opinion and its contrary, Doxa and paradox, the stereotype and the novation, fatigue and freshness, relish and disgust: I like/I don't like. -- Roland Barthes, "Roland Barthes"
The Text is a little like a score of this new kind: it solicits from the reader a practical collaboration. A great novation this, for who executes the work? -- Edited by Dorothy Hale, "The Novel: An Anthology of Criticism and Theory 1900-2000"
Novation comes directly from the Latin word novātiōn which meant "a renewing." Its roots are novāre which means "to renew" and the suffix -ion which denotes an action, as in creation or fusion.
Dictionary.com Word of the Day
http://www.dictionary.com/wordoftheday/
Fact of the Day
Fact of the Day : Where and when was Queen Anne's War fought? (from A Dictionary of World History )
Queen Anne's War ( 1702 – 13 ) A war between Britain and France, part of the War of the Spanish Succession , that was fought in North America. Frontier warfare in New England with savage French and Native American attacks on outlying settlements broke out again at the start of the 18th century (see French and Indian Wars ).
In 1710 the French lost Port Royal in Acadia (known to the British as Nova Scotia), which came under British control. A British attempt to capture Quebec the next year was prevented by storms. In the south, a South Carolinian (British) expedition destroyed the Spanish city of St Augustine, Florida, in 1702 and a retaliatory French attack on Charleston ( 1706 ) was repulsed. In the Caribbean, St Christopher (St Kitts) was captured from the French in 1702 , but Guadeloupe resisted British attacks in the following year. Thereafter only privateers and buccaneers remained active. The main British colonial gains at the Peace of Utrecht were Nova Scotia, western Newfoundland, and St Christopher.
How to cite this entry: "Queen Anne's War" A Dictionary of World History. Oxford University Press, 2000. Oxford Reference Online. Oxford University Press. 1 January 2012
Queen Anne's War ( 1702 – 13 ) A war between Britain and France, part of the War of the Spanish Succession , that was fought in North America. Frontier warfare in New England with savage French and Native American attacks on outlying settlements broke out again at the start of the 18th century (see French and Indian Wars ).
In 1710 the French lost Port Royal in Acadia (known to the British as Nova Scotia), which came under British control. A British attempt to capture Quebec the next year was prevented by storms. In the south, a South Carolinian (British) expedition destroyed the Spanish city of St Augustine, Florida, in 1702 and a retaliatory French attack on Charleston ( 1706 ) was repulsed. In the Caribbean, St Christopher (St Kitts) was captured from the French in 1702 , but Guadeloupe resisted British attacks in the following year. Thereafter only privateers and buccaneers remained active. The main British colonial gains at the Peace of Utrecht were Nova Scotia, western Newfoundland, and St Christopher.
How to cite this entry: "Queen Anne's War" A Dictionary of World History. Oxford University Press, 2000. Oxford Reference Online. Oxford University Press. 1 January 2012
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