Daily Content Archive
(as of Saturday, March 20, 2021)| Word of the Day | |||||||
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disaffect
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| Daily Grammar Lesson | |
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Defining the Indicative MoodThe indicative mood is a type of grammatical mood used to express facts, statements, opinions, or questions. It is the sole realis mood in English. This mood can be used in the past, present, or future tense, and in what kinds of sentences? More... | |
| Article of the Day | |
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 Hex SignsHex signs are a form of folk art that originated in the Pennsylvania Dutch culture. Though the colorful geometric emblems remain popular in Pennsylvania, they are not used by the local Amish or Mennonite populations. There is some controversy over the true purpose of hex signs. While some folk-art scholars maintain that the signs are purely decorative, they are associated with folk magic, and their designs carry symbolic meaning. A hex sign featuring a horse head is said to protect against what? More... | |
| This Day in History | |
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 US Approves Antiretroviral Drug AZT as a Treatment for AIDS (1987)Though it was originally developed as an anticancer drug in 1964, azidothymidine (AZT) was never approved for that purpose. Two decades later, however, it was discovered to be effective in fighting HIV. At the time, thousands of people were dying of AIDS, and no other treatment was forthcoming. For humanitarian reasons, the drug was approved by the US Food and Drug Administration in a matter of months, rather than the usual eight to 10 years. How does the drug prevent HIV from reproducing? More... | |
| Today's Birthday | |
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 Burrhus Frederic "B.F." Skinner (1904)Forgoing his early goal of being a writer, Skinner earned his doctorate in psychology at Harvard, where he later spent much of his teaching career. A leading exponent of the behavioral approach to psychology, Skinner maintained that learning occurs as a result of an organism responding to, or operating on, its environment, a phenomenon he called operant conditioning. Skinner did extensive research with animals and, during WWII, worked for the US government training what animal to guide missiles? More... | |
| Quotation of the Day | |
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 The woods are never solitary—they are full of whispering, beckoning, friendly life. But the sea is a mighty soul, forever moaning of some great, unshareable sorrow, which shuts it up into itself for all eternity…The woods call to us with a hundred voices, but the sea has one only—a mighty voice that drowns our souls in its majestic music. The woods are human, but the sea is of the company of the archangels.Lucy Maud Montgomery (1874-1942) | |
| Idiom of the Day | |
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let it slip— To accidentally or inadvertently reveal a given secret or important piece of information. More... | |
| Today's Holiday | |
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 Tunisia Independence Day (2021)Independence Day is a public holiday in Tunisia commemorating a treaty signed on this day in 1956 that formally recognized Tunisia's independence from France. It had been a French colony since the 1880s. More... | |
| Word Trivia | |
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Today's topic: punctuationem dash, en dash - The em dash is the long dash used in punctuation whose length is based on the width of the letter M; the en dash is shorter (the width of an N) and the hyphen is even shorter. More... punctual - From Latin punctum, "point," it can mean "pertaining to punctuation," or "of or relating to a point in space." More... square brackets, parentheses, braces - Square brackets were formerly called crotchets, round brackets are commonly called parentheses, and curly brackets are called braces; the punctuation called brackets derives from the bookshelf type, implying that, in writing, these marks "lift up" a section of a sentence. More... stigmeology - The art of punctuation. More... | |