Monday, June 8, 2009

tergiversation \tuhr-jiv-uhr-SAY-shuhn\, noun:

1. The act of practicing evasion or of being deliberately ambiguous.
2. The act of abandoning a party or cause.

Tergiversation comes from Latin tergiversatus, past participle of tergiversari, "to turn one's back, to shift," from tergum, "back" + versare, frequentative of vertere, "to turn." The verb form is tergiversate.

chai anxiety

• Feeling overwhelmed by the ridiculous number of options at the coffee shop.

Venti? Double soy-based foam? A shot of what? Yeesh I have chai anxiety -- I need some caffeine!

Trivia

What middle name was shared by baseball great Joe DiMaggio and his ballplayer brothers, Dom and Vince?

• Paul. The full names of the three brothers were Joseph Paul DiMaggio Jr., Dominic Paul DiMaggio, and Vincent Paul DiMaggio. St. Paul was their father’s favorite saint.

Today in History:

• Muhammad: the founder of Islam, PBUH, died in Medina, shortly after delivering his Farewell Sermon (632)
• desegregation: the US Supreme Court ruled that restaurants in Washington, DC, could not refuse black patrons (1953)
• Scott O'Grady: US Air Force pilot was rescued by Marines; he had avoided capture for six days after being shot down over Bosnia (1995)
• PHP: scripting language was publicly released by Danish-Greenlandic programmer Rasmus Lerdorf (1995)

Today's Birthdays:

• Frank Lloyd Wright (1867-1959): iconic architect
• Francis Crick (1916-2004): co-discoverer of DNA's double-helix structure; Nobel laureate Robert Aumann (79) shares this birth date
• Jerry Stiller (82): comedian/actor; also, stars Joan Rivers (76), Bernie Casey (70), Sonia Braga and Kathy Baker (both 59), Griffin Dunne (54), Keenan Ivory Wayans (51), Julianna Margulies (43), Kelli Williams (39) and Mark Feuerstein (38)
• Sara Paretsky (62): author, V.I. Warshawski detective stories; also, writers Marguerite Yourcenar (1903-1987) and Dan Futterman (42)
• Tim Berners-Lee (54): guy who wove the World Wide Web
• Scott Adams (52): cartoonist, Dilbert; plus, artist Leroy Neiman (82)
• Kanye West (32): Grammy-winning rapper; also, musicians Robert Schumann (1810-1856), Nancy Sinatra (69), Chuck Negron (67) and Boz Scaggs (65)