Daily Content Archive
(as of Sunday, December 9, 2018)| Word of the Day | |||||||
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portend
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| Daily Grammar Lesson | |
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Using Viewpoint Adverbs to Specify an Aspect of SomethingWe use specific viewpoint adverbs to delimit, or specify, what part or aspect of something we are talking about. What are these adverbs often called? More... | |
| Article of the Day | |
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 The 1996 Mount Everest DisasterIn 1996, 15 people died trying to reach the summit of Mount Everest, making it the deadliest year in the mountain's history. Eight of the deaths occurred on a single day in May, when climbers were caught by a fierce storm. The disaster gained wide publicity and raised questions about the commercialization of Everest. Journalist Jon Krakauer, who witnessed the tragedy firsthand while on assignment for a magazine article, later recounted his experience in what bestseller? More... | |
| This Day in History | |
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 John Birch Society Founded (1958)The John Birch Society was founded in 1958 by Robert H. Welch, Jr., a retired candymaker, to combat communism and promote ultraconservative causes in the US. It was named for an American missionary and army intelligence officer killed by Chinese communists in 1945, considered by the society the first hero of the Cold War. Its membership reached more than 70,000 in the 1960s. Since then, it has promoted many objectives, including pressing for the US to withdraw from what organization? More... | |
| Today's Birthday | |
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 Grace Murray Hopper (1906)A math professor, Hopper joined the US Navy during World War II. She was assigned to the Bureau of Ordnance Computation Project at Harvard, where she worked on the first fully automatic calculator, the Mark 1. Made of 765,000 parts and using typewriters for output, it sounded, she said, like a thousand knitting needles. She later helped develop UNIVAC I—the first US commercial electronic computer—and high-level programming languages. What computer term did she popularize and possibly coin? More... | |
| Quotation of the Day | |
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 There is nothing nobler or more admirable than when two people who see eye to eye keep house as man and wife, confounding their enemies and delighting their friends.Homer (900 BC-800 BC) | |
| Idiom of the Day | |
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living impaired— A jocular, pseudo-politically correct term for being dead. More... | |
| Today's Holiday | |
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 Tanzania Independence Day (2022)Tanzania Independence Day is a celebration of the independence—from the British in 1961—of Tanganyika, which merged with Zanzibar in 1964 to become Tanzania. The day is a national holiday celebrated with parades, youth leagues marching before the president at the stadium in Dar es Salaam, school games, cultural dances, and aerobatics by the air force. More... | |
| Word Trivia | |
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Today's topic: summitcolophon - A crowning or finishing touch, from Greek kolophon, "summit" or "finishing stroke." More... knoll - The summit or rounded top of a mountain or hill, it seems to derive from Old Teutonic knoo-lo, meaning "ball, clod, knot." More... acrobat - Derived from Greek akrobatos, "walking on tiptoe," from Greek akron, "summit," and baino, "walk." More... | |