On Dateline NBC January 23, someone said that George W. Bush was the 44th president. That didn't sound right, so I checked a list and found that Barack Obama is the 44th president. Then I got curious--what is the most common first name? Answer is forthcoming.

The Nomura’s jellyfish is a monster to be reckoned with. It’s the size of a refrigerator — imagine a Frigidaire Gallery Premiere rather than a hotel minibar — and can exceed 450 pounds. For decades the hulking medusa was rarely encountered in its stomping grounds, the Sea of Japan. Only three times during the entire 20th century did numbers of the Nomura’s swell to such gigantic proportions that they seriously clogged fishing nets. Then something changed. Since 2002, the population has exploded — in jelly parlance, bloomed — six times. In 2005, a particularly bad year, the Sea of Japan brimmed with as many as 20 billion of the bobbing bags of blubber, bludgeoning fisheries with 30 billion yen in losses. Why has the Nomura’s jellyfish become a recurring nightmare? The answer could portend trouble for the world’s oceans. In recent years, populations of several jellyfish species have made inroads at the expense of their main competitor — fish — in a number of regions, including the Yellow Sea, the Gulf of Mexico, and the Black Sea. Overfishing and deteriorating coastal water quality are chief suspects in the rise of jellies. http://e360.yale.edu/feature/massive_outbreak_of_jellyfish_could_spell_trouble_for_fisheries/2359/

Here are the top candidates for longest word in the English language. One comes from Shakespeare (of course.) In Love's Labour's Lost, a clown named Costard, arrested for having unlawful fling with a milkmaid, gets to say honorificabilitudinitatibus. That's 27 letters. The word means something like "loaded with honors," but, suspiciously, it comes in the middle of a conversation about wordiness, so it might be a word created to be wordy.
Here's one you know better: antidisetablishmentarianism. It has 28 letters, but what is it? J ust a bundle of suffixes and prefixes piled up into a little attention-grabbing hummock. The most famous long word (at least in our times) is, of course, Disney's supercaliphragilisticexpialidocious. It uses 34 letters, but doesn't mean anything beyond giving Julie Andrews and Dick Van Dyke (and a slew of animated characters) something to dance to. Science writer Sam Kean, in his book The Disappearing Spoon, worked really hard on this and after much sleuthing, he landed on a word that comes not from dancing English nannies but from virus-hunting scientists. It's a protein, found in a virus, but this is a very dangerous, economically important virus, the first ever discovered--dreaded tobacco mosaic virus. It appeared in all its lettery splendor in 1964 in a reference source for chemists, "Chemical Abstracts." It is one thousand, one hundred and eighty five letters long. See the word at: http://www.npr.org/blogs/krulwich/2011/01/21/133052745/whats-the-longest-word-in-the-english-language

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From: Dan Fullerton Subject: Remonstrate
The word brings to mind the Flushing Remonstrance of 1657, when the word "remonstrate" was still fairly young. The Flushing Remonstrance was about religious freedom in the Dutch colony of New Holland, when the authorities in New Amsterdam prohibited the Quakers from residing and worshiping in Flushing. The Flushing town council went on record challenging Gov. Stuyvesant. When the town persisted in its openness to religious tolerance, several council members were tried for violating the law and one or two lost their lives. One who was executed, I believe, was the town clerk. It is precisely because of such public actions as this that the United States is a country in which religious tolerance is practiced.
From: Robert Payne Subject: Beau Geste
There's a 1924 P.C. Wren adventure novel, Beau Geste, which still floats around this culture's collective subconscious (especially in its filmed versions) and probably remains the word's best-known use. In the English novel, Beau Geste is the name of the heroic lead character. The French phrase "beau geste" also translates as "gracious gesture". But now that I know the word "geste" can also mean "notable adventures or exploits", this gives the novel's title another layer of meaning.
From: John Alzamora Subject: limn
Def: 1. To portray in words. 2. To draw or paint, especially in outline.
In Elizabethan England a limner was a miniaturist. In our Colonial and Federalist periods, limner was the name given to a portrait painter, often self-taught and itinerant and sometimes anonymous. A handful, however, acquired studio training and became quite famous and much in demand in their time, the most famous of which is perhaps Gilbert Stuart. See: Paintings from The Historic Hudson Valley Collection and What Is a Limner?, by S.E. Smith.
From: Dorothy S. Stewart Subject: limn
My favorite use of the word is in Francis Thompson's poem, "The Hound of Heaven": Must Thou char the wood ere Thou canst limn with it?
From: Tanvi Choudhary Subject: Theme: short words which are potent
I had once read these words somewhere as the 'Ten small words with the greatest meaning' -- "If it is to be, it is up to me." The moment I read the theme for this week, these words just struck me. They are small but potent, just like the theme.

Mothers and fathers used to bring up children: now they parent. Critics used to review plays: now they critique them. Athletes podium, executives flipchart, and almost everybody Googles. Watch out—you’ve been verbed. The English language is in a constant state of flux. New words are formed and old ones fall into disuse. But no trend has been more obtrusive in recent years than the changing of nouns into verbs. “Trend” itself (now used as a verb meaning “change or develop in a general direction”, as in “unemployment has been trending upwards”) is further evidence of—sorry, evidences—this phenomenon. It is found in all areas of life, though some are more productive than others. Financiers are never lacking in ingenuity: Investec recently forecast that “Better-balanced autumn ranges should allow Marks & Spencer to anniversary tougher comparisons”—whatever that may mean. Politics has come up with “to handbag” (a tribute to Lady Thatcher) and “to doughnut”—that is, to sit in a ring around a colleague making a parliamentary announcement, so that it is not clear to television viewers that the chamber is practically deserted. Verbing—or denominalisation, as it is known to grammarians—is not new. Steven Pinker, in his book “The Language Instinct” (1994), points out that “easy conversion of nouns to verbs has been part of English grammar for centuries; it is one of the processes that make English English.” Elizabethan writers revelled in it: Shakespeare’s Duke of York, in “Richard II” (c1595), says “Grace me no grace, nor uncle me no uncle”, and the 1552 Book of Common Prayer includes a service “commonly called the Churching of Women”.

There is a difference today, says Robert Groves, one of the editors of the new “Collins Dictionary of the English Language”. “Potential changes in our language are picked up and repeated faster than they would have been in the past, when print was the only mass communication medium, and fewer people were literate.” http://moreintelligentlife.com/content/ideas/anthony-gardner/youve-been-verbed

Nominees for 83rd Academy Awards http://www.oscars.org/awards/academyawards/83/nominees.html