euphemism — eu “good” + pheme "speaking”
euphoria — eu “good” + pherein "to carry"
http://www.copyediting.com/good-vibes-vocab-euphony-euphemism-euphoria
In March 2013, Bridget Flynn, a school librarian who lives in Philadelphia, was
searching for an old family drawing to print on the invitations to her daughter
Rebecca’s bridal shower. As she and
Rebecca rummaged through the several generations of family artifacts—letters, photographs,
an envelope of hair cuttings—she keeps in plastic bins in her basement, they
found stack of small envelopes tied
together with a black shoelace. “Oh,
honey, these are love letters,” Flynn said.
Rebecca untied them and began reading the first one: “Mr Ros, be not uneasy, you son charley
bruster be all writ we is got him and no powers on earth can deliver out of our
hand.” “Mom, these are ransom
letters,” Rebecca said. Flynn went
through the rest of the stack with her husband, David Meketon, a research
consultant at the University of Pennsylvania. They counted a total of 22 letters, all of
them addressed to Christian Ross. Kidnappers had taken his 4-year-old son, whose
full name was Charles Brewster Ross, and demanded $20,000 for his return. Meketon googled “Christian Ross” and found
that in 1876, Ross published a memoir about the kidnapping. The memoir, available online, includes
facsimiles of several of the letters. As
he compared the handwriting in the images to the documents that lay before him,
Meketon realized he held America’s first known ransom kidnapping notes. http://blogs.smithsonianmag.com/history/2013/12/the-story-behind-the-first-ransom-note-in-american-history/
Paraphrases from Live Wire by Harlan Coben
The great thing about the
Internet--it gives everyone a voice. The
bad thing about the Internet--it gives everyone a voice. The great bastion for the cowardly and
anonymous.
A golf course is a sanctuary. You feel almost blessed when you look out
over the calming spread of green.
In 1913, one man sent a letter that would transform the telephone industry. The letter gave rise to the country's last and
most powerful monopoly. And like the
Internet of this century, it gave millions of ordinary people the chance to
stay in touch more easily than they ever had before. The letter's author was
Nathan C. Kingsbury — a vice president of AT&T many have since forgotten. Wilson's administration was threatening a
legal assault on AT&T. The telephone
company had been aggressively buying up its competitors around the country —
maybe too many. Perhaps AT&T should
be broken up, Wilson mused. Perhaps the
government should take control. Then came
Kingsbury's letter. In under
900 words, Kingsbury smoothed everything over. It produced a miraculous result in Wilson and
his deputy in the Justice Department. "I
gain the impression more and more from week to week that the businessmen of the
country are sincerely desirous of conforming with the law," Wilson gushed,
“and it is very gratifying to have the occasion, as in this instance, to deal
with them in complete frankness and to be able to show them that all that we
desire is an opportunity to cooperate with them.” The White House’s antitrust concerns were
resolved practically overnight. But the
letter's impact can still be felt today. By dropping its antitrust case, the Wilson
administration effectively gave its blessing to AT&T's dominance of the
telephone industry. In exchange for this
government-sponsored monopoly, AT&T agreed to operate as a public utility,
eventually providing high-quality phone service to the vast majority of
Americans regardless of income or geography. Kingsbury's commitments to President Wilson
would later be formalized and expanded by Congress into the legal obligations that
still bind the modern successors of the old AT&T: Verizon, CenturyLink, and
the new AT&T. But technological
changes are rapidly undermining the century-old bargain of the Kingsbury
Commitment. Telephone incumbents want to
abandon conventional analog phone service in favor of a new generation of
Internet-based voice applications. In
this new age of telephony, Americans will need to decide whether phone
companies owe them the same obligations they demanded in the 20th century. Brian
Fung http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-switch/wp/2013/12/19/this-100-year-old-deal-birthed-the-modern-phone-system-and-its-all-about-to-end/?tid=hpModule_88854bf0-8691-11e2-9d71-f0feafdd1394&hpid=z13
Ten Library Stories That Shaped
2013 http://lisnews.org/ten_stories_that_shaped_2013
Two "lost" films starring actor Peter Sellers are to be shown in
public for the first time in more than 50 years. The star made the comedy shorts Dearth of a
Salesman and Insomnia is Good For You in 1957 as he tried to make his name as a
film actor. The two 30-minute films were
originally salvaged from a skip outside a film company's office in 1996 before
being forgotten about again. They will
be screened at the Southend Film Festival in May 2014. These films capture
Sellers at a career crossroads. He's
nailed the radio with The Goons, and made a good start in TV and film. Now he wants to be a screen star. The two rediscoveries were spoof government
information films. Mark Cousins
from The Peter Sellers Appreciation Society said the discoveries, which are the
final two of three missing films, were "very exciting" and helped to
"complete the canon of his legacy".
"These early films, although they're only shorts, are quite
important because they were really made before he hit the big time," he
said. "They are missing pieces of a
jigsaw puzzle. [Sellers] is very well known for his later works such as Dr
Strangelove and the Pink Panther films and these help to give people an
appreciation of how he got there."
"Bah, humbug!” says Ebenezer Scrooge
about Christmas — but some readers would use the same phrase to dismiss “A
Christmas Carol” itself. One critic
described Charles
Dickens’s famous book as “saturated with exaggerated Christmas fervour” and
“larded with soggy and indigestible lumps of sickly sentiment.” That’s probably a little too strong, too
dismissive for this artistically complex tale about a skinflint’s change of
heart. Over the next few days, many
families will again watch Alistair Sim or the Muppets in one of the innumerable
film adaptations. Yet will they ever
open the book? All too commonly, “A
Christmas Carol,” like “Don
Quixote” and “Robinson
Crusoe,” is a classic people think they know without
actually ever having read a word of it.
Michael Patrick Hearn’s excellent annotated edition, which first
appeared in 1976, has
been reissued this year (though without any updating since its last
appearance in 2004; the bibliography is noticeably out of date). Hearn — best known as an authority on children’s
literature and on “The
Wizard of Oz” in particular — provides a substantial introduction in which
he tracks Dickens’s
early career up through his 1842 visit to America and the composition of “A
Christmas Carol” that followed in 1843.
Hearn points out that the young novelist drew upon the depiction of
Yuletide festivities in Washington Irving’s underappreciated “Sketch-Book
of Geoffrey Crayon” and took his “conversion” plot from “The Story of the
Goblins Who Stole a Sexton,” part of the wonderful “Christmas at Dingley Dell”
section of his own “Pickwick
Papers.” Michael Dirda http://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/books/the-annotated-christmas-carol-by-charles-dickens/2013/12/18/54b53542-669c-11e3-a0b9-249bbb34602c_story.html?tid=hpModule_ef3e52c4-8691-11e2-9d71-f0feafdd1394&hpid=z11
See quotes from A Christmas Carol at http://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/3097440-a-christmas-carol Phrases such as Merry Christmas and Bah, humbug!
were popularized with this ghost story that is also a tale of morality and
redemption.
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