Daily Content Archive
(as of Thursday, April 30, 2020)| Word of the Day | |||||||
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comely
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| Daily Grammar Lesson | |
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Adding Verb Phrases to a SentenceVerb phrases add additional information to a sentence. Because verb phrases can be made up of more than one verb, as well as the information relating to those verbs, we can add quite a bit of information into a single sentence. This additional information is used to answer what questions? More... | |
| Article of the Day | |
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 Cyrano de BergeracCyrano de Bergerac is an 1897 play by Edmond Rostand whose title character was inspired by a 17th-century writer with an exceptionally large nose. Rostand's play, written entirely in rhymed couplets, relates the tale of Cyrano, a soldier and poet, who falls in love with the beautiful Roxane. Rather than woo Roxane himself, the large-nosed Cyrano provides his handsome friend, Christian, with the dialogue to win her heart. What word did this play introduce into the English language? More... | |
| This Day in History | |
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 Casey Jones Dies on the Cannonball Express (1900)Jones was an American locomotive engineer whose main claim to fame, until his fateful run on the Cannonball Express, was his punctuality. On April 30, 1900, he was driving the Cannonball Express south on a dangerous, accident-prone run when he suddenly saw a stalled freight train ahead. Instead of jumping to safety, he stayed to slow his train, saving his coworkers and passengers but losing his own life in the process. Who wrote the ballad that immortalized him as a folk hero? More... | |
| Today's Birthday | |
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 Kaspar Hauser (1812)In 1828, a teenage boy appeared in Nuremberg, Germany, carrying a letter that stated he had been placed in the care of the anonymous author as an infant. This caretaker claimed to have taught the boy reading, writing, and religion but never let him leave the house. The boy barely spoke but confirmed that he had been kept in a dark prison hole. In the following years, he sustained several mysterious injuries, and he was fatally stabbed in 1833. Who is thought to have been behind his death? More... | |
| Quotation of the Day | |
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 Man's desire for the approval of his fellows is so strong, his dread of their censure so violent, that he himself has brought his enemy within his gates; and it keeps watch over him, vigilant always in the interests of its master to crush any half-formed desire to break away from the herd.W. Somerset Maugham (1874-1965) | |
| Idiom of the Day | |
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be in tall cotton— To be in a time or period of great success or wellbeing; to be doing very well. More... | |
| Today's Holiday | |
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 Stratford Festival (2020)What started in Stratford, Ontario, in 1953 as a six-week Shakespearean drama festival under the artistic leadership of Alec Guinness and Irene Worth has since expanded into a 26-week event drawing an audience of half a million people. All of Shakespeare's plays have been performed here over the years, as well as works by Sophocles (c. 496-406 BCE), Henrik Ibsen (1828-1906), Jean-Baptiste Molière (1622-1673), Anton Chekhov (1860-1904), Richard Sheridan (1751-1816), Samuel Beckett (1906-1989), and a number of Canadian playwrights. More... | |
| Word Trivia | |
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Today's topic: mushroommushroom - Before it was a mushroom, it was called either toadstool or funge, from Latin fungus; small mushrooms are called "buttons," medium-sized ones are "cups," and the largest are "flat" or "open" mushrooms. More... fly agaric - A mushroom with a narcotic juice that, in sufficient quantities, is poisonous. More... pileated - Etymologically means "capped," like a mushroom, but now refers to a bird with a crest on the top of the head from the bill to the nape. More... shiitake - Japanese for "evergreen beech, chinquapin" (shii) and "mushroom" (take). More... | |