Daily Content Archive
(as of Thursday, October 18, 2018)| Word of the Day | |||||||
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do-gooder
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| Daily Grammar Lesson | |
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Pronunciation Changes with NominalizationWhen creating nouns, there are instances in which, instead of changing a word's spelling, we change where we pronounce a stress on the word's syllables to indicate a shift from a verb to a noun. What is this change known as? More... | |
| Article of the Day | |
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 ConscriptionConscription, compulsory enrollment in a country's armed forces, existed as early as the 27th century BCE in Egypt. Since then, forms of obligatory military service have been recorded in countless cultures; Japanese samurai, Aztec warriors, and citizen militiamen in ancient Greece and Rome are just a few examples of conscripted forces. Conscription in the modern sense dates from 1793, when the French Republic raised an army of 300,000 men. What countries draft women into military service? More... | |
| This Day in History | |
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.jpg){kind=small} Alaska Formally Transferred from Russia to US (1867)In 1867, Russia sold Alaska to the United States for $7,200,000. The purchase was accomplished solely through the determined efforts of US Secretary of State William H. Seward, and for many years afterward the land was derisively called "Seward's Folly" or "Seward's Icebox" because of its supposed uselessness. It was not until after the discovery of gold in the Juneau region in 1880 that Alaska was given a governor and a local administration. When did Alaska become a state? More... | |
| Today's Birthday | |
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 Thomas Love Peacock (1785)Peacock was an English writer whose comic and satirical novels—which contain some of his best poems—parody the intellectual pretenses of his age. His best-known work, Nightmare Abbey, satirizes the English romantic movement and contains characters based on Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lord Byron, and his close friend Percy Bysshe Shelley. After Shelley's death, Peacock became his literary executor. Peacock died at the age of 80 from injuries sustained while trying to save what from a fire? More... | |
| Quotation of the Day | |
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 It is the same with man as with the tree ... The more he seeketh to rise into the height and light, the more vigorously do his roots struggle earthward, downward, into the dark and deep—into the evil.Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) | |
| Idiom of the Day | |
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Doctors make the worst patients.— It is difficult to give people help or advice on something in which they are professionals, because they often feel as though they already know better than anyone else how to handle the situation or perform a given task. More... | |
| Today's Holiday | |
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 Boggy Bayou Mullet Festival (2019)A festival of seafood, folk culture, sports, and pageants, the Boggy Bayou Mullet Festival has been held since 1976 in Niceville, Florida, to celebrate the unappreciated mullet. The festival serves up 10 tons of fried and smoked mullet, plus it features beauty pageants, entertainment on stage all weekend, and arts and crafts on display. Beyond the mullet, there are samplings from the other food booths: Cajun specialties like crawfish pie, gumbo, and gator sausage; American Indian staples of fried bread and pasole; barbecued rabbit; and stingray on a stick. More... | |
| Word Trivia | |
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Today's topic: tree trunkpirogue - A canoe made from a tree trunk. More... tree ring - Any of the concentric rings of the cross-section of a tree trunk, representing a year's growth, or the layer of wood produced by a year's growth in a woody plant; also called annual ring. More... block - Derives from Middle Dutch blok, "tree trunk." More... snag - Literally first meant a stump on a tree trunk or a piece of timber underwater that obstructed navigation. More... | |