Sunday, March 27, 2011

equivocate \ih-KWIV-uh-kayt\, intransitive verb:

• To be deliberately ambiguous or unclear in order to mislead or to avoid committing oneself to anything definite.

To equivocate is literally to call equally one thing or the other: It comes from Medieval Latin aequivocare, from the Latin aequus, equal + vocare, to call (from Latin vox, voice).

Defensive Eating

• Strategically consuming food for the sole purpose of preventing others from getting it.

Mattâs mother-in-law unexpectedly arrived with a delicious dinner immediately after Matt finished a 12-inch sub. In order to prevent his wife from getting the surprise meal, he used defensive eating to consume the additional food.

Trivia

What creatures of the deep have a body part called a melon?

• Toothed whales. The melon is the bulging forehead just in front of the blowhole of most toothed whales. It’s believed to be used to focus sounds during echolocation—the process by which sound waves emitted by the whale bounce or echo back when they strike an object.

History

• telephone: the first long-distance call was made from Boston to New York (1884)
• Nikita Khrushchev: became prime minister of the Soviet Union (1958)
• Good Friday Earthquake: North America's most powerful earthquake struck Alaska, measuring 9.2 on the Richter scale; it killed over 100 and triggered devastating tsunamis (1964)
• Tenerife crash: the world's worst aviation disaster took place when two 747 airliners collided on Tenerife, Canary Islands (1977)
• Viagra: was approved by the FDA for erectile dysfunction (1998)

Birthdays

• Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen (1845-1923): physicist who developed X-ray imagery; and, chemist Otto Wallach (1847-1931)
• Edward Steichen (1879-1973): artist photographer; plus, lithographer Nathaniel Currier (1813-1888) and architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe (1886-1969)
• James Callaghan (1912-2005): British PM; and, Japanese PM Sato Eisaku (1901-1975)
• Walt Mossberg (64): WSJ technology columnist; plus, columnist Anthony Lewis (84)
• Quentin Tarantino (48): hack filmmaker; also, actors Julian Glover (76), Austin Pendleton (71), Michael York (69), Xuxa (48), Pauley Perrette (42), Nathan Fillion (40), Taylor Humphries (35) and Brenda Song (23)
• Fergie (36): singer who started out with the Black Eyed Peas and went solo; plus, musicians Ben Webster (1909-1973), Sarah Vaughan (1924-1990), Tony Banks (61), Andrew Farriss (52), Dave Koz (48) and Mariah Carey (41)