Daily Content Archive
(as of Thursday, June 7, 2018)| Word of the Day | |||||||
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viviparous
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| Daily Grammar Lesson | |
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Aspects of the Future TenseWe use different aspects with verbs in the future tense to describe exactly how an event is structured in relation to a future point in time. The future continuous and future perfect continuous are typically only used with what type of verb? More... | |
| Article of the Day | |
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 Mirror BoxesBetween 50 and 80 percent of amputees experience phantom limb sensations, feelings that an absent limb is still present. These sensations are often painful. In the early 1990s, neurologist Vilayanur S. Ramachandran hypothesized that the phenomenon might be caused by changes in the brain rather than in peripheral nerves and developed the mirror box to alleviate the discomfort. A simple device, it creates the visual illusion that the phantom limb has reappeared. How is this believed to help? More... | |
| This Day in History | |
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 US Supreme Court Decides Griswold v. Connecticut (1965)In 1961, Estelle Griswold, executive director of the Planned Parenthood League of Connecticut, opened a birth control clinic for women in deliberate defiance of an 1879 law outlawing the use or distribution of contraceptives. She was arrested and fined. Her appeal made it to the US Supreme Court, which stated in a landmark 1965 decision that married couples had a right to "marital privacy," which included the right to use birth control. When was the same right extended to unwed individuals? More... | |
| Today's Birthday | |
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 Gwendolyn Brooks (1917)Brooks was an award-winning poet whose compositions, written in a variety of forms, deal with the experience of being black and often of being female in America. Her 1949 book of poetry, Annie Allen, received a Pulitzer Prize, the first ever awarded to an African American. In 1994, she was named the National Endowment for the Humanities Jefferson Lecturer, one of the highest honors in the American literary world. How old was Brooks when her first poem was published? More... | |
| Quotation of the Day | |
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 It is easy to find fault, if one has that disposition. There was once a man who, not being able to find any other fault with his coal, complained that there were too many prehistoric toads in it.Mark Twain (1835-1910) | |
| Idiom of the Day | |
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temper tantrum— An extreme and childish display of unreasonable anger, frustration, or distemper. More... | |
| Today's Holiday | |
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 Holland Festival (2022)Holland (the Netherlands) decided in 1947 to have a single festival focused on three major cities—Amsterdam, Rotterdam, and The Hague—that would cover a wide range of artistic and cultural activities and at the same time draw top international artists to the Netherlands. Nowadays the festival is centered in Amsterdam in June with nearly 150 programs. The festival offers not only performances of orchestral and choral works but opera, ballet, contemporary music, dance, theater, and film as well. More... | |
| Word Trivia | |
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Today's topic: tribelow man - On an actual totem pole, it is really the most important man in the tribe. More... tribe - From Latin tribus, it may refer to the three divisions of early Romans, the Latins, Sabines, and Etruscans. More... tribunal - Originally referred to a seat or raised platform for judges, from Latin tribunus, "head of a tribe." More... cannibal - When Columbus was trying to find the Spice Islands, he was told of a tribe of man-eating natives in Cuba and Haiti called Caribs (from which we get Caribbean) or Caniba (Columbus' rendition of the name); the word canib, meaning "brave and fierce," became cannibal, meaning "anthropophagite," a person who eats human flesh. More... | |