Daily Content Archive
(as of Sunday, January 7, 2024)| Word of the Day | |||||||
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gambol
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| Daily Grammar Lesson | |
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Defining Absolute PhrasesAn "absolute phrase" is a grammatically independent group of words that serves to modify or add information to an entire sentence. What is an absolute phrase usually made up of? More... | |
| Article of the Day | |
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 The CatchDuring Game 1 of the 1954 World Series, Willie Mays of the New York Giants made one of the greatest and most famous plays in the history of baseball. In the eighth inning, with the score tied 2–2, Mays tracked down a deep fly ball and caught it over his shoulder before spinning and hurling it to the infield to keep the runners in place and prevent the Cleveland Indians from taking the lead. The tied game went into extra innings and ended when which team finally scored its winning runs? More... | |
| This Day in History | |
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 Galileo Galilei Discovers Three of Jupiter's Four Largest Moons (1610)Jupiter has more than 60 moons. The four largest—Io, Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto—were the first satellites of a planet other than Earth to be detected. They were discovered by Galileo in 1610, shortly after he invented the telescope, and are therefore known as the Galilean satellites. On January 7, 1610, Galileo observed near Jupiter what he described at the time as "three fixed stars, totally invisible by their smallness." How long did it take Galileo to discover the fourth? More... | |
| Today's Birthday | |
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 Zora Neale Hurston (1891)An anthropologist, folklorist, and author, Hurston spent much of her life collecting African-American folktales in the rural South and in other places, such as Haiti, Bermuda, and Honduras. She was a significant figure in the Harlem Renaissance and collaborated with her friend Langston Hughes on the play Mule Bone in 1931. Along with her folklore collections, she also wrote four novels, including the influential Their Eyes Were Watching God. Why did the book inspire controversy? More... | |
| Quotation of the Day | |
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 When the sword is once drawn, the passions of men observe no bounds of moderation.Alexander Hamilton (1755-1804) | |
| Idiom of the Day | |
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be looking for trouble— To be doing something or acting in a manner that will very likely result in trouble, difficulty, or danger. More... | |
| Today's Holiday | |
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.png) Distaff Day (2025)After the 12-day Christmas celebration ended on Epiphany, St. Distaff's Day was traditionally the day on which women resumed their chores, symbolized by the distaff, a tool used in spinning flax or wool. It was also called Rock Day—"rock" being another name for the distaff. The "spear side" and the "distaff side" were legal terms used to distinguish the inheritance of male from that of female children, and the distaff eventually became a synonym for the female sex as a whole. Distaff Day was not really a church festival, but it was widely observed at one time in England. More... | |
| Word Trivia | |
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Today's topic: uniformman of the cloth - Originally applied to anyone who wore a uniform or livery for work. More... mufti - Civilian clothes worn by a person who usually wears a uniform. More... uniform - Something that is uniform has literally only "one form," from Latin unus, "one," and forma, "form." More... doughboy - The small round doughnuts served to sailors in the 19th century were called doughboys—and they resembled the round buttons on the sailors' uniforms—so the sailors came to be known as this. More... | |