WHO SAID THAT?
“Leave no stone unturned.” Euripides
(c.485–406 BCE) Greek playwright
Euripides prospered at the court of Archelaus, king of Macedonia, and it is
said he won first prize in five dramatic contests. His tragedy Herakleidae contains the
expression “turn every stone,” which over time has metamorphosed into the
common expression we hear today.
“Necessity is the mother of invention.” Plato
(427–347 BCE) The famous statement
appears in Book II of Greek philisopher's masterpiece, The Republic (c.375
BCE). The sage’s premise is that
necessity is the creator of the ideal state, one which would administer
justice, uphold the law and provide a stable society whose individuals could
prosper to the best of their capabilities.
The original quote translates as, “The true creator is necessity, who is
the mother of our invention.” The folk
process has expanded upon Plato’s wisdom to produce the common saying,
“Necessity is the mother of invention and peril is the father.”
“There’s no getting blood out of a turnip.” Frederick
Marryat (1792–1848) One of Frederick
Marryat’s most popular novels was Japhet in Search of a Father (1836). Japhet, preparing for a future as a doctor,
and a boy named Timothy, begin apprenticing for an apothecary. Japhet first learns how to draw blood from a
cabbage leaf before his mentor lets him use his arm, and Timothy mutters the
popular saying, continuing, “but it seems there is more chance with a cabbage.”
“The shot heard round the world.” Ralph
Waldo Emerson (1803–1882) Ralph Waldo
Emerson’s immortal line is now used principally by sports reporters to describe
dramatic home runs or holes-in-one. In
the final inning of the final game of the National League playoffs in 1951,
Robert “Bobby” Thompson’s three-run homer won the pennant for the New York
Giants. It was universally hailed as
“the shot heard round the world.” The
original, however, had nothing to do with athletics. It appeared in Emerson’s Concord Hymn (1837),
a poem written to celebrate the second battle of the American War of
Independence: By the rude bridge that
arched the flood, Their flag to April’s breeze unfurled, Here once the
embattled farmers stood, And fired the shot heard round the world. Joseph Ajlouny Read more at http://www.josephsajlouny.com/who-said-that/
The prehistoric White Horse of Uffington is one of the oldest hill figures in Britain, and is
believed to have inspired the creation of all the other white horse hill
figures in the region. Mystery abounds the creation of the White
Horse--who made it, when and why?
ome historians believe the figure represents a horse goddess connected
with the local Belgae tribe, others believe it is Celtic goddess Epona,
protector of horses, while an alternative theory suggests it is not a horse at
all but the mythical dragon slain by Saint George. Oxfordshire, the region in which the figure
is found, and its neighbouring county of Wiltshire, are home to many white
horse hill figures. There are or were at
least twenty-four of these hill figures in Britain, with no less than thirteen
being in Wiltshire. However, the White
Horse of Uffington is the only one with known prehistoric origin.
Initially believed to date back to the Iron Age due to similar images found
depicted on coins from that period, more recent dating by the Oxford
Archaeological Unit placed the hill figure in the Bronze Age, some 3000 years
ago. The Uffington White Horse is high
on an escarpment of the Berkshire Downs below Whitehorse Hill, a mile and a
half south of the village of Uffington.
Measuring some 374 feet in length, the stylised image was created by
digging trenches into the earth some ten feet wide, exposing the white chalk
bedrock below. The shape of the horse
has changed over the centuries. The
present outline may be only a part of the original: aerial photography shows
that a larger, more conventional shape of a horse lies beneath. The loss of shape has been caused by slippage
of the top soil and by repeated recutting.
April Holloway Read more and see pictures at http://www.ancient-origins.net/ancient-places-europe/mystery-white-horse-uffington-001445
National Geographic Photographer of
the Year Contest 2017 Grand
prize winner: "The Power of
Nature" by Sergio Tapiro Velasco A
powerful eruption illuminates the slopes of Mexico's Colima Volcano. Browse by categories at
The Hatch
Act of 1939, officially An Act to Prevent Pernicious Political
Activities, is a United
States federal law whose main
provision prohibits employees in the executive branch of the federal
government, except the president, vice-president, and certain designated
high-level officials of that branch, from engaging in some forms of
political activity. It went into law on
August 2, 1939. The law was named
for Senator Carl Hatch of New Mexico.
Read about provisions, restrictions,
applicability, challenges, amendments and more at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hatch_Act_of_1939
The scot in scot-free is
related to the noun shot (associated with the verb shoot), influenced
by cognate words in Scandinavian languages.
The modern Scandinavian equivalents are Swedish and Norwegian skatt,
Danish skat, and Icelandic skattur, meaning
‘tax’. Scot is attested from Middle English with reference
to various types of taxes, dues, and payments.
In modern English, it is used primarily in historical contexts. Ralph
Waldo Emerson is cited in the Oxford English Dictionary (OED)
for his use of the word in describing the ‘personal independence’ of the
Saxons: ‘No reliance for bread and games
on the government, no clanship, no patriarchal style of living by the revenues
of a chief, no marrying-on, no system of clientship suits them; but every man
must pay his scot’ (1860 ‘Wealth’ in The Conduct of Life). Scot-free arose in the 16th century
as an alteration of the earlier term shot-free. It probably originated in the sense ‘not
required to pay a scot (tax or fee)’ or ‘free of charge’, as in this example
from 1792: ‘Scot-free the Poets drank
and ate; They paid no taxes to the State!’ (John Wolcot, Odes of
Condolence). This meaning is no
longer common, but it seems to have been used as late as 1921, in hearings
before the US Senate Committee on Finance:
‘The common laborer does not know that that act [on taxation] was
passed. He is scot free at 40 cents an
hour’. However, the earliest attested
evidence for scot-free in the OED is in
the sense that is more common today, in a more generalized meaning of ‘without
being punished’, dating from as early as 1528.
Thus, in his epistolary novel Pamela (1740), Samuel
Richardson wrote ‘She should not, for all the Trouble she has cost you, go away
scot-free.’ Scot and
lot referred to local or
municipal taxes; by extension, it came to be used as an adjective to designate
a man who paid such taxes and hence was eligible to vote or (more generally)
was respectable: ‘May we not regret that potwallopers, and scot and lot men,
and freemen then lost their privilege?’ (1865 Liverpool Mercury 12
Oct.). In the context of British
politics, scot and lot also referred to a system of voting
which restricted the franchise to men who paid ‘scot and lot.’ Scot came up in religious
contexts as well. Rome-scot was an annual tax paid to the
papal see at Rome in pre-Reformation England, and soul-scot was
money paid on behalf of a deceased person to their former church. The most intriguing scot compound
is probably scot-ale.
According to the OED, this referred to ‘a festivity
or “ale” held by the lord of a manor or a forester or other bailiff, for which
a contribution was exacted and at which attendance was probably compulsory’; in
other words, a party that one was compelled to attend, and for which was also
compelled to pay a cover charge. Katherine
Connor Martin http://blog.oxforddictionaries.com/2015/04/scot-free-origin/
"The greatest superpower you
can have is your mind," says filmmaker and Broadway producer Amanda Lipitz, whose
new documentary, Step, will open in theaters nationwide August 18,
2017. The Sundance
Film Festival hit goes where scripted stories this summer have not: into the inner city of Baltimore. The protagonists are high school seniors
at a rigorous charter school that aims to have every student accepted to
college—and many are the first in their families to go. Their bond
is step, a dynamic performance tradition that uses the body as both a
percussive and expressive instrument. They
call themselves the Lethal Ladies of BLSYW (Baltimore Leadership
School for Young Women). The teens come
from low-income homes where covering basic needs, like food and
electricity, is "incredibly challenging," says Lipitz.
Her cameras followed them into school and the gym, where the
step dance team practiced. The extracurricular
activity came with strings, requiring a 2.0 GPA—and daily school attendance. As a school rule, "if you miss school,
you miss step practice," says Lipitz, who calls the
strict policy a "life raft" for team members like recent
graduate and team captain Blessin Giraldo, who "even at 11 knew she
needed something to keep her connected to school—and that was her way of doing
it." Lipitz filmed the teens for
years, but found the strongest content came from the students' junior and
senior years, when those who had put in the work came under consideration from
colleges like Johns Hopkins and Alabama A&M, and those who had
not faced a probable life sentence in poverty. Since
filming ended in 2016, the three protagonists highlighted—Giraldo, Cori
Grainger and Tayla Solomon, all 19—have remained in college. What's more, the Baltimore school's first
graduating class of 2016 earned $800,000 in college scholarships. The women filmed were also granted individual
scholarships from film producers (Lipitz declined to specify the amount) after
the film sold in a bidding war for $4 million at Sundance. Andrea Mandell https://www.usatoday.com/story/life/movies/2017/08/02/why-baltimore-dance-documentary-step-actually-superhero-movie/530517001/
http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com Issue 1749
August 7, 2017 On this date in 1782, George
Washington ordered the creation of the Badge of Military Merit to honor
soldiers wounded in battle. It was later
renamed the Purple
Heart. On this date in 1927, the Peace
Bridge opened between Fort Erie, Ontario and Buffalo,
New York. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/August_7
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