Daily Content Archive
(as of Monday, August 28, 2017)| Word of the Day | |||||||
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acerbic
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| Daily Grammar Lesson | |
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Object ComplementsAn object complement is a word or group of words that describes, renames, or completes the direct object of the verb. Which parts of speech can be object complements? More... | |
| Article of the Day | |
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 Et in Arcadia Ego: I Am Also in Arcadia"Et in Arcadia Ego" is a Latin phrase that most famously appears as the title of two highly influential 17th-century paintings depicting shepherds from classical antiquity gathered around an austere tomb. The phrase is usually interpreted as "I am also in Arcadia," and its purpose is to set up an ironic contrast between mortality and idle merriment. Recently, however, the phrase has been used in conspiracy theories and interpreted to mean what? More... | |
| This Day in History | |
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 Lynching of 14-Year-Old Boy Helps Inspire US Civil Rights Movement (1955)At age 14, African-American Emmett Till was murdered in Mississippi after reportedly whistling at a white woman, Carolyn Bryant, in a grocery store. Her husband and his half-brother beat Till, shot him in the head, and dumped his body in the Tallahatchie River, weighing it down by tying a metal fan around his neck with barbed wire. Till's body was pulled from the river three days later. What decision made by Till's mother about her son's funeral helped bring attention to his brutal murder? More... | |
| Today's Birthday | |
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 Vladimir Shukhov (1853)Though less widely known than his contemporaries Thomas Edison and Gustave Eiffel, Russian engineer, scientist, and architect Vladimir Shukhov has drawn comparisons to both of them. His innovations in the petroleum refining process and the means of transporting petroleum products revolutionized the oil industry, while his architectural works were of a sort never seen before. He pioneered the construction of thin-shell and tensile structures as well as what innovative type of curved structure? More... | |
| Quotation of the Day | |
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 Cruelty is the law pervading all nature and society; and we can't get out of it if we would.Thomas Hardy (1840-1928) | |
| Idiom of the Day | |
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make (the) baby Jesus cry— To be offensive, immoral, unethical, in poor taste, etc., as might cause or provoke the displeasure or disapproval of Jesus Christ. More... | |
| Today's Holiday | |
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 Feast of St. Augustine of Hippo (2021)St. Augustine is best known for his spiritual autobiography, the Confessions, which detail the excesses of his youth, his career as a teacher of rhetoric, his years as a believer in Manicheism and Platonism, and his belated conversion to Christianity. It is primarily for his writings that he is known as the patron saint of theologians and scholars, and one of the "Four Latin Fathers" of the Christian Church. When a company of Spanish soldiers landed on the coast of Florida on St. Augustine's Day in 1565, they named the U.S.'s oldest European community after him. More... | |
| Word Trivia | |
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Today's topic: verticalvertical tasting - Wine tasting in order of year of vintage. More... lateral thinking, vertical thinking - Lateral thinking is illogical; vertical thinking is logical. More... ordinate, abscissa - The ordinate or Y axis is vertical; the abscissa or X axis is horizontal. More... vertical integration - The merging of companies that are within the chain of companies that handle a single item from raw material production to retail sale. More... | |