Originally known as Long Acre (also Longacre) Square after London’s carriage district, Times Square served as the early site for William H. Vanderbilt’s American Horse Exchange.  In the late 1880s, Long Acre Square consisted of a large open space surrounded by drab apartments.  Adolph S. Ochs, owner and publisher of The New York Times from 1896 to 1935, selected a highly visible location to build the Times Tower, which was the second tallest building in the city at the time.  In January 1905, the Times finally moved into their new headquarters, built between Broadway and Seventh Avenue and 42nd and 43rd Streets.  The previous spring, Mayor George B. McClellan signed a resolution that renamed the intersection of Broadway and Seventh Avenue from Long Acre Square to Times Square.  Ochs told the Syracuse Herald, “I am pleased to say that Times Square was named without any effort or suggestion on the part of The Times.”  Yet, he clearly felt proud:  the new building represented “the first successful effort in New York to give architectural beauty to a skyscraper,” he said.  Within a decade, the Times outgrew their space and moved to a new location, but not before starting a tradition that continues today: the New Year’s Eve spectacular.  Ochs staged the first event to commemorate the new building and crowds still gather today to bring in the new year.  Read much more and see pictures at https://www.timessquarenyc.org/history-of-times-square

Emoticons (English: “emote” + “icon”) are a vast set of ad-hoc symbols formed by typing punctuation marks and letters to simulate faces and other things.  Emoticons were invented at Carnegie-Mellon University in 1983 with the familiar smiley to highlight something meant to be taken lightly.  The true Carnegie-Mellon smiley has a hyphen for a nose, but many people leave it out.  Emoji (Japanese: “e”: “picture” + “moji”: “character”) are a large (more than 1000 as of 2016 and growing) set of characters officially defined by the Unicode standard.  The similarity between “emoji” and “emoticon” is purely coincidental.  Also, Japanese words do not form plurals with a final “s,” so the plural of emoji is emoji.  Emoji originated with several Japanese mobile phone companies in the late 1990s and were incorporated into Unicode in 2010.  Kaomoji, (Japanese: “kao”: “face” + “moji”: “character”) are a kind of emoticon that use characters from all over Unicode.  Dave Land  https://www.quora.com/Whats-the-difference-between-emoji-and-emoticons

GIF  ("Graphics Interchange Format") is an image file format commonly used for images on the web and sprites in software programs.  Unlike the JPEG image format, GIFs uses lossless compression that does not degrade the quality of the image.  However, GIFs store image data using indexed color, meaning a standard GIF image can include a maximum of 256 colors.  The original GIF format, also known as "GIF 87a," was published by CompuServe in 1987. In 1989, CompuServe released an updated version of the format called "GIF 89a."  The 89a format is similar to the 87a specification, but includes support for transparent backgrounds and image metadata.  Both formats support animations by allowing a stream of images to be stored in a single file.  However, the 89a format also includes support for animation delays.   Even though the GIF format was published more than a quarter century ago, it is still widely used on the web.  NOTE:  A GIF image can actually store more than 256 colors.  This is accomplished by separating the image into multiple blocks, which each continue unique 256 color palettes.  The blocks can be combined into a single rectangular image, which can theoretically produce a "true color" or 24-bit image. However, this method is rarely used because the resulting file size is much larger than a comparable .JPEG file.  https://techterms.com/definition/gif

TAKE YOUR PICK  According to Steve Wilhite, the creator of the original GIF format, it is pronounced "jiff" (like the peanut butter brand).  Most people pronounce it "gif" (with a hard G).  Forte, meaning a strong point, should be pronounced fort.  FOR-tay is a musical term, meaning loudness, and comes from Italian.  The two-syllable version is so entrenched that it is accepted.

The boll weevil, a very small variety of beetle, is native to Mexico, and nests in the boll--or seed capsule--of cotton, hence its name.  With its distinctive long snout, the boll weevil is a legendary pest, one of the all-time greats on the list of most feared insects of the agricultural world.  It moves where the cotton grows, and migrated across the Rio Grande from Mexico into Texas as soon as the land there had decent cotton fields for it to feed on, in 1892.  It moves quickly; the beetle is a decent long-distance flier, and individual beetles have been found as far as 150 miles away from where they were tagged.  By 1909, the boll weevil had landed in Alabama.  By 1915, the incorrigible weevil had made its way all the way to Enterprise, a small city near the state’s southern border.  In Coffee County, where Enterprise sits, almost 60% of the cotton crop was destroyed that year.  Peanuts were mostly ignored in the U.S. until the late 1800s, when P.T. Barnum began selling them at the circus.  At the turn of the century, an array of new machines for planting, harvesting, and shelling peanuts were invented, and in 1915, George Washington Carver began his crusade on behalf of the crop.  Enterprise began growing peanuts just after the weevils arrived, and by 1917, Coffee County was the leading producer of peanuts in the entire country.  The switch from cotton to peanuts is credited not just with saving the town from destruction by weevils, but also for introducing a level of prosperity that was new to in Enterprise.  On December 11, 1919, the town unveiled a beautiful, earnest statue in honor of the boll weevil, for forcing the town to abandon one crop and adopt a far better one.  Initially, the statue was just a Grecian-looking woman raising her hands above her head, but 30 years later, in 1949, a boll weevil was added on a pedestal atop her hands.  For some reasons, the statue was the victim of frequent vandalism; it was damaged beyond repair in 1998.  A replica was made and stands in its place, while the original stands in the Pea River Historical & Genealogical Society, a museum dedicated to preserving the history of Enterprise.  Dan Nosowitz    https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/boll-weevil-monument-alabama  See also https://www.enterpriseal.gov/history-of-enterprise and https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/agricultural-pest-honored-herald-prosperity-enterprise-alabama-180963506/

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The Kazakh language is currently written using a modified version of Cyrillic, a legacy of Soviet rule, but president, Nursultan A. Nazarbayev  announced in May 2017 that the Russian alphabet would be dumped in favor of a new script based on the Latin alphabet.  The decision, however, raised a tricky issue:  how to write down a tongue that has no alphabet of its own but has always used scripts imported from outside.  The president’s ardent intervention in Kazakhstan’s passionate debate over a new script and his proposed solution—he wants lots and lots of apostrophes—have highlighted how virtually everything in this former Soviet land, no matter how small or obscure, hinges on the will of a single 77-year-old man, or at least those who claim to speak for him.  “This is the basic problem of our country:  If the president says something or just writes something on a napkin, everybody has to applaud,” said Aidos Sarym, a political analyst and member of a language reform commission set up last year.  The Republic of Kazakhstan, for example, will be written in Kazakh as Qazaqstan Respy’bli’kasy.  In a country where almost nobody challenges the president publicly, Mr. Nazarbayev has found his policy on apostrophes assailed from all sides.  Linguists, who had recommended that the new writing system follow the example of Turkish, which uses umlauts and other phonetic markers instead of apostrophes, protested that the president’s approach would be ugly and imprecise.  Others complained the use of apostrophes will make it impossible to do Google searches for many Kazakh words or to create hashtags on Twitter.  “We are supposed to be modernizing the language but are cutting ourselves from the internet,” Mr. Sarym said.  Andrew Higgins  https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/15/world/asia/kazakhstan-alphabet-nursultan-nazarbayev.html 

Naomi Parker Fraley, the real "Rosie the Riveter," died January 20, 2018 at the age of 96.  A photo of a young Fraley, with arm flexed and head topped by a red-and-white polka-dot bandana, would inspire the 1943 Rosie the Riveter poster designed by J. Howard Miller.  Promulgated across the home front during the war years, Fraley's portrait would outlive the war and establish an indefinite place in the American visual lexicon, most recently appearing on posters at national Women's Marches held on the day of her death.  Michelle Robertson  https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/Naomi-Parker-Fraley-rosie-the-riveter-alameda-died-12516102.php

http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com  Issue 1831  January 23, 2018  On this date in 1546,  having published nothing for eleven years, François Rabelais published the Tiers Livre, his sequel to Gargantua and Pantagruel.  On this date in 1849, Elizabeth Blackwell was awarded her M.D. by the Geneva Medical College of Geneva, New York, becoming the United States' first female doctor.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/January_23  Word of the Day  glossolalia  noun  Speaking a language one does not know, or speaking elaborate but apparently meaningless speech, while in a trance-like state (or, supposedly, under the influence of a deity or spirits); speaking in tongues.