Daily Content Archive
(as of Friday, October 4, 2024)| Word of the Day | |||||||
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uninitiated
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| Daily Grammar Lesson | |
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Defining ParticiplesParticiples are words formed from verbs that can function as adjectives or gerunds. Participles can also be used to form which verb tenses? More... | |
| Article of the Day | |
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 Music of the TrecentoConsidered by some art historians to be the beginning of the Renaissance, the Trecento was a 14th-century period in Italy that saw renewed focus on the arts, including painting, architecture, literature, and, especially, music. Influenced by troubadours and a type of polyphonic sacred music called the conductus, composers throughout the period pioneered new forms of expression, especially in secular songs written in the Italian vernacular. Who was the period's most famous composer? More... | |
| This Day in History | |
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 Gutzon Borglum Begins Sculpting Mount Rushmore (1927)Mount Rushmore National Memorial, a massive carving of four US presidents' heads, each about 60 ft (18 m) high, on the side of a South Dakota mountain, took 400 workers 14 years to complete. Its designer, sculptor Gutzon Borglum—who had previously worked on a Confederate memorial on Georgia's Stone Mountain—died before Rushmore was completed, and his unfinished Hall of Records behind the heads is off-limits to the public. What nearby mountain sculpture will dwarf Rushmore when completed? More... | |
| Today's Birthday | |
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 Louis X of France (1289)Louis the Stubborn became king of Navarre, a region in the north of Spain bordering France, upon the death of his mother, Joan of Navarre. Upon the death of his father, Philip IV, in 1314, he became king of France. His rule was short-lived. Following a game of tennis in 1316, he drank a large amount of wine and died from an unverified illness. He is remembered primarily for his concessions to the nobility. At the time of his death, his wife was pregnant with his heir. What happened to the child? More... | |
| Quotation of the Day | |
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 Feast, n.: A festival. A religious celebration usually signalized by gluttony and drunkenness, frequently in honor of some holy person distinguished for abstemiousness.Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914) | |
| Idiom of the Day | |
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clutch (one's)/the pearls— To react in a scandalized or mortified manner to once-salacious but now relatively common things, events, situations, etc. More... | |
| Today's Holiday | |
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 Lesotho Independence Day (2025)Formerly Basutoland, the Kingdom of Lesotho was formally granted its independence from Great Britain on this day in 1966. It had been a British colony since the 1860s. Before the flag-changing ceremonies at midnight to symbolize Lesotho's new autonomy, a colorful procession took place as King Moshoeshoe II (b. 1938) paraded in full regalia leading 100 chiefs into the capital city of Maseru. More... | |
| Word Trivia | |
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Today's topic: lightningnimbostratus cloud - Can drop precipitation but has no lightning or thunder. More... artillery - A poetic term for thunder and lightning. More... coup de foudre - A sudden unforeseen event or instantaneous and overwhelming passion, such as love at first sight; it is French, literally, "stroke of lightning." More... lightning - Etymologically, lightning is simply something that illuminates or "lightens" the sky, a contraction of the earlier "lightening." More... | |