Daily Content Archive

(as of Sunday, May 20, 2018)
Word of the Day

Definition:()
Daily Grammar Lesson

Using Interrogative Pronouns

Interrogative pronouns are used in interrogative sentences to ask questions, functioning either as the subject or object of such sentences. Most often, interrogative pronouns are used in what type of questions? More...
Article of the Day

Rule of Thumb

Now used to refer to a convenient principle with a broad application not intended to be strictly accurate in every situation, the term "rule of thumb" first appeared in print in Sir William Hope's The Compleat Fencing-Master in 1692. The phrase is thought to have originated with woodworkers who used the length of their thumbs, rather than rulers, for measurements. However, it is often erroneously claimed that the term originally referred to a law that limited the thickness of what? More...
This Day in History

Shake-Speares Sonnets First Published (1609)

Shakespeare penned 154 sonnets in his lifetime. Likely written sometime in the 1590s, the majority of the poems were first published in a 1609 work titled Shake-Speares Sonnets. The first 126 of the 154 sonnets are addressed to a young man whose identity has long intrigued scholars. The publisher, Thomas Thorpe, wrote a dedication to the first edition in which he claimed that a person with the initials WH had inspired the sonnets. What are some theories about who the man might have been? More...
Today's Birthday

James Maitland "Jimmy" Stewart (1908)

Stewart was an American actor known for his self-effacing screen persona. His slow, halting line delivery initially made him difficult to cast, but his idealistic characters in films such as Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939) soon endeared him to audiences, and he won an Oscar in 1940. His role as the quintessential small-town man helped make It's a Wonderful Life (1946) a Christmas classic. During World War II, Stewart served as a bomber pilot and attained what military rank? More...
Quotation of the Day
The truth is, we each of us have an inborn conviction that the whole world, with everybody and everything in it, was created as a sort of necessary appendage to ourselves. Our fellow men and women were made to admire us and to minister to our various requirements.

Jerome K. Jerome (1859-1927)

Idiom of the Day

meatball surgery

Battlefield surgery that is performed hastily so as to quickly stabilize a patient and prevent their imminent death. Popularized (and possibly coined) by H. Richard Hornberger in his semi-autobiographical novel M*A*S*H, which focused on doctors serving in a fictional mobile army surgical hospital during the Korean War. Primarily heard in US. More...
Today's Holiday

Cameroon National Day (2024)

National Day is a public holiday commemorating the people's vote to establish a united Republic of Cameroon on May 20, 1972. This day is also known as Constitution Day. More...
Word Trivia

Today's topic: prune

amputate - Comes from Latin ambi, "around," and putare, "to prune, trim." More...

dried plum - Another name for a prune. More...

preen - Generally thought to be an alteration of prune, "cut branches." More...

purge - To purge a tree is to prune it; to purge a candle is to snuff it. More...

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