Thursday, April 5, 2007

 

Spotlight: The Oxford English Dictionary just released the newest list of neologisms to make it into its online dictionary. As expected, many of the words come from the technical world, with the word "wiki" leading the list. The word was popularized by the launching of Wikipedia, the Internet's largest user-generated encyclopedia. Other words to make it into the OED this year include "infobahn," "malware," "undelete" and "virtualize."

Quote: "Words are the coins making up the currency of sentences, and there are always too many small coins." — Jules Renard

Holiday: Qingming jie (Tomb Sweeping Day, China)

Today's News:

• Iran: 15 British sailors released (story)
• cell phones: FCC says to turn them off on planes (story)
• Pliocene epoch: skeleton of prehistoric whale is found in Tuscan countryside (story)
• bald eagles: hatched in the wild on Santa Catalina Island for the first time since the 1940s (story)
• hurricanes: meteorologist predicts "very active" season in 2007, with at least 17 named storms; chances are good that one major hurricane will make landfall on US coast this year (story)

Today's History:

• Pocahontas: Algonquian princess married English colonist John Rolfe (1614)
• veto: was used by a US president for 1st time — by George Washington (1792)
• Helen Keller: breakthrough occurred when tutor Anne Sullivan spelled out "water" in her hand using the manual alphabet (1887)

Today's Birthdays:

• Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679): political philosopher, Leviathan
• Spencer Tracy (1900-1967), Bette Davis (1908-1989), Gregory Peck (1916-2003): stars of the silver screen
• Colin Powell (70): former US secretary of state
• Agnetha Fältskog (57): one of the ABBA four