Daily Content Archive
(as of Sunday, February 10, 2019)| Word of the Day | |||||||
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housebound
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| Daily Grammar Lesson | |
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Ending a Sentence with a PrepositionNearly every grammar guide agrees that it is acceptable and often more correct to end a sentence with a dangling preposition than to rewrite the sentence specifically to avoid it. Why? More... | |
| Article of the Day | |
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 BioacousticsBioacoustics is the study of the relation between living organisms and sound, focusing on the neurophysiological, anatomical, and evolutionary basis of sounds produced and detected by animals, especially those involved in communication. It was established as a scientific discipline by Slovene biologist Ivan Regen, whose experiments with crickets in the early 20th century proved that insects respond to acoustic stimuli produced by other individuals. What animal sounds are humans unable to hear? More... | |
| This Day in History | |
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 The St. Scholastica Day Riot (1355)Oxford is one of the most prestigious universities in the world, but its history is not without blemish. In 1355, some students got into an argument with a local tavern keeper over the quality of his alcohol. This escalated into a physical altercation that then snowballed into an all-out riot between the university's students and townspeople. When the dust settled days later, 63 students and a number of townspeople were dead. Which side paid reparations to the other for the next 470 years? More... | |
| Today's Birthday | |
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 Boris Pasternak (1890)Pasternak was a Russian author whose novel Doctor Zhivago, an epic of wandering, spiritual isolation and love amid the harshness of the revolution and its aftermath, became a bestseller in the West but was circulated only in secrecy in the Soviet Union until 1987. Pasternak was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1958, but he was forced to decline it because of Soviet opposition to his work. Why was Pasternak's name said to have been crossed off an execution list by Joseph Stalin? More... | |
| Quotation of the Day | |
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 Of course poets have morals and manners of their own, and custom is no argument with them.Thomas Hardy (1840-1928) | |
| Idiom of the Day | |
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plastic grin— A forced, artificial smile; a smile someone wears despite having no feelings of happiness or joy. More... | |
| Today's Holiday | |
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 Feast of St. Paul's Shipwreck (2022)This feast is a commemoration in Malta of the shipwreck of St. Paul on the island in 60 CE, an event told about in the New Testament. When storms drove the ship aground, Paul was welcomed by the "barbarous people" (meaning they were not Greco-Romans). According to legend, he got their attention when a snake bit him on the hand but did him no harm, and he then healed people of diseases. Paul is the patron saint of Malta and snakebite victims. The day is a public holiday, and is observed with family gatherings and religious ceremonies and processions. More... | |
| Word Trivia | |
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Today's topic: shopchippy - A shop that sells fish and chips can be called a chippy. More... odditorium - A shop for oddities or oddments (broken parts or parts of once-complete sets). More... shop, store - At first, shop designated a small retail establishment and store was applied only to a large establishment; now the differences are blurred. More... stationer - A bookseller who had a regular "station" or shop at a university, unlike most booksellers, who were itinerant vendors. More... | |