Daily Content Archive
(as of Sunday, August 13, 2017)| Word of the Day | |||||||
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duster
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| Daily Grammar Lesson | |
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PrepositionsPrepositions are used to express the relationship of a noun or pronoun (or another grammatical element functioning as a noun) to the rest of the sentence. How do prepositions differ from infinitives? More... | |
| Article of the Day | |
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 Diyu: The Realm of the DeadElements from Taoism, Buddhism, and traditional Chinese folk religion are all incorporated in the Chinese concept of Diyu, a mythological realm of the dead. A purgatory of sorts, Diyu is a maze of underground levels and chambers where souls atone for their earthly sins and prepare for reincarnation. According to some legends, Diyu has 18 levels, each of which is reserved for specific categories of offenders. What are some of the punishments found in each level? More... | |
| This Day in History | |
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 The Berlin Wall Goes Up (1961)After World War II, the Soviet Union occupied East Berlin while control of West Berlin was split between the US, the UK, and France. From 1949 to 1961, more than 2 million East Germans fled to West Germany to escape Communist rule before the wall was built to stop the tide of defectors. First constructed of barbed wire and erected at night, the barrier was eventually replaced by a concrete structure studded with watchtowers manned by East German soldiers. What was the "Death Strip"? More... | |
| Today's Birthday | |
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 Frederick Sanger (1918)After earning his PhD at Cambridge University in 1943, British biochemist Frederick Sanger decided to continue conducting his research at his alma mater. He remained there for the entirety of his four-decade career, making discoveries about the structure of proteins, particularly insulin, as well as DNA sequencing that would earn him not one but two Nobel prizes. He was only the fourth person in history to have earned this distinction. Who are the other three two-time Nobel laureates? More... | |
| Quotation of the Day | |
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 How does one kill fear, I wonder? How do you shoot a specter through the heart, slash off its spectral head, take it by its spectral throat?Joseph Conrad (1857-1924) | |
| Idiom of the Day | |
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lucky devil— Someone who has just experienced particularly good fortune, generally of whom the speaker is envious to some degree. More... | |
| Today's Holiday | |
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 Nemoralia (2021)The Nemoralia was an ancient Roman festival in honor of the goddess Diana held at Nemi, in the territory of Aricia about 16 miles southeast of Rome. Diana was worshipped throughout Rome and Latium (now western Italy) on August 13, the day on which her temple on the Aventine Hill had been dedicated by Servius Tullius. But her most famous cult was in Aricia, where the Nemoralia was observed to protect the vines and the fruit trees. It is still common in some parts of the Orthodox Christian Church for worshippers to make offerings of new wheat and cakes to the Theotokos on that day. More... | |
| Word Trivia | |
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Today's topic: selectelegant - Comes from Latin eligere, "select." More... eximious - Means "choice, excellent, select," or "distinguished." More... garble - Originally meant "to sort out" or "to select in a biased way," and was applied to the selection and sorting out of individual passages from a person's writings or any separation of the good from the bad, of a selection of the worst and setting aside the better; it evolved to mean "to jumble, scramble." More... select - From Latin legere, "choose," with the prefix se-, "apart." More... | |