Volume 194

Contents

• Weird Words – Factotum
• Article – Achieve More in 2011
• Special Dates -- Something to Celebrate Each Day
• Humor – Goal Achievement – Attention to Detail
• Thoughts – Persistence
• In Closing

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Weird Words – Factotum

When the word first appeared, it was always paired with another to make what looked like a personal name. Dominus Factotum was a ruler with absolute powers, Magister Factotum was a master of all, while a Johannes Factotum was a would-be universal genius who could turn his hand to anything. His modern equivalent is Jack-of-all-trades, which probably derives from it.

For there is an upstart crow, beautified with our
feathers, that with his tiger's heart wrapped in a
player's hide, supposes he is as well able to bombast out
a blank verse as the best of you; and being an absolute
Johannes fac totum, is in his own conceit the only Shake-
scene in a country.
[Robert Greene, A Groatsworth of Wit Bought with a
Million of Repentance, 1592. Spelling modernised. The
object of his ire was William Shakespeare.]

Greene wrote "factotum" as two words, as was common at the time, since he would have known very well that it derives from two Latin words, "fac!", the imperative of "facere", to do, plus "totum", the whole thing. The experts aren't sure where it was coined, since similar expressions turn up in French and German in the middle to late sixteenth century at about the same time as they appear in English.

Since then, "factotum" has gone down in status. It now refers to a servant or employee of lowly status who is expected to turn his hand to any job that comes up.
Uncle Fred continued his job as roundsman and general
factotum when Mr Wigley replaced the horse-drawn vans
with new electric delivery vehicles around 1952.
[Derby Evening Telegraph, 25 May 2009.]

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WORLD WIDE WORDS
Copyright (c) Michael B. Quinion 2009. You may reproduce this mailing in whole or in part in other free media provided that you acknowledge the source and quote the Web address of "http://www.worldwidewords.org".

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Article – Five Secrets to Getting Organized


Have you ever wondered why some people accomplish far more than others in life? While it’s tempting to attribute other people’s accomplishments to good luck, good contacts and deep pockets, in reality most people who achieve great things in life don’t have any more luck, friends or money than anyone else. So what do they have?  What makes them different? Find out here.

http://www.businessknowhow.com/growth/achievedreams.htm

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Special Dates – Something to Celebrate Each Day


14 January
1914: Henry Ford announced the newest advance -- the assembly line production of cars. The new method reduced assembly time of a car from 750 to 93 minutes.

15 January
1929: Martin Luther King, Jr., minister and civil rights leader, born at Atlanta, Georgia.
1943: Work was completed on the Pentagon, now the headquarters of the U.S. Department of Defense.

16 January
1920: The 18th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution was ratified having been proposed 18 December 1917 -- "After one year from the ratification of this article the manufacture, sale, or transportation of intoxicating liquours within, the importation thereof into, or the exportation thereof from the United States and all territory subject to the jurisdiction thereof for beverage purposes is hereby prohibited" -- thus commenced National Prohibition.

17 January
1928: A. M. Josepho received a patent for the fully automatic, film-developing machine.

18 January
1779: Peter Mark Roget, born at London, England. He was a physician, teacher (founder of the Society for the Diffusion of Knowledge), scientist (in1832, published Treatises on Electricity, Galvanism, Magnetism, and Electro-magnetism) and lexicographer (in 1852 published the Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases Classified and Arranged so as to Facilitate the Expression of Ideas and Assist in Literary Composition)
1911: For the first time an aircraft landed on a ship. Pilot Eugene B. Ely flew onto the deck of the USS Pennsylvania in San Francisco harbor.

19 January
1736: James Watt, born at Greenock, Scotland. He was a mathematical instrument maker, surveyor, construction engineer and researcher in chemistry and metallurgy; improved steam engine design to make more practicable and developed the engine crank movement, throttle valve, & governor among other devices.
1809: Edgar Allen Poe, poet, short story author and critic, born at Boston, Massachusetts.
1915: George Claude of Paris, France, received a United States patent for the electric neon sign.

20 January
1896: Nathan Burnbaum (a.k.a.: George Burns), state, screen and television entertainer, born at New York City, New York.
1914: First school for naval air training established at Pensacola, Florida.

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Humor – Goal Achievement – Attention to Detail

TA man called Jacob finds himself in dire trouble. His business has gone bust and he's in serious financial trouble. He's so desperate that he decides to ask God for help.

He begins to pray. "God, please help me.  I've lost my business and if I don't get some money, I'm going to lose my house as well. Please let me win the lotto."

Lotto night comes and somebody else wins. Jacob goes back to praying. "God please let me win the lotto. I've lost my business, my house and I'm going to lose my car as well."

Lotto night comes and Jacob still has no luck! Back to praying.  "My God, why have you forsaken me? I've lost my business, my house, my car and my wife and children are starving.

I don't often ask for your help and I always been a good servant to you. Why won't you just let me win the lotto this one time so I can get my life back in order?"

Suddenly there is a blinding flash of light as the heavens open and Jacob is confronted by the voice of God Himself. "Jacob, meet me half way on this one. Buy a ticket!"

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Thoughts – Persistence


“The majority of people are ready to throw their aims and purposes overboard, and give up at the first sign of opposition or misfortune.  A few carry on despite all opposition, until they attain their goal.  These few are the Fords, Carnegies, Rockefellers, and Edisons.  There may be no heroic connotation to the word 'persistence', but the quality is to the character of man what carbon is to steel."

     – Napoleon Hill (1883-1970), an American author (e.g., Think and Grow Rich, You Can Work Your Own Miracles) who was one of the earliest producers of the personal-success literature

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In Closing

Keep smiling; have fun!

– Paul

Volume 193

Contents

• One Person's Musing – The United States
• Weird Words – Heiligenschein
• Article – Five Secrets to Getting Organized
• Special Dates – Something to Celebrate Each Day
• Humor – British and Americans
• Thoughts – The United States
• In Closing

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One Person's Musing – The United States

"In a self-governing republic – good government in some places, dubious in others – 3000 miles wide, 1800 miles long, with fifty separate states which in many important matters have almost absolute powers; with 200 million people drawn from scores of nations; what is remarkable is not the conflict between them but the truce. Enough is happening in America at any one time – enough that is exciting, frightening, funny, brutal, brave, intolerable, bizarre, dull, slavish, eccentric, inspiring, and disastrous – that almost anything you care to say about the United States is true. You can make a case for thinking this the best, the worst, the most abject, the most alert democracy ever invented."

– Alistair Cooke, (1908-2004), British/American journalist, television personality and broadcaster in his essay "Eternal Vigilance – By Whom?" dated 19 October 1969

"America is so vast that almost anything said about it is likely to be true and the opposite is probably equally true."

– James Thomas Farrell (1904-1979), American novelist

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Weird Words – Heiligenschein

It's a German word - literally "holy light" - for an aureole or circle of light around an object. Applied to people it's a halo.

The word has been borrowed in a particular and specialist sense for a sheen that, if you're very lucky, you may see around the shadow of your head. The sun must be low in the sky and your shadow must be cast on grass that's damp with dew, so you have to be an early bird to stand much chance of seeing it.

It's caused by internal reflection within the drops of water on the blades of grass (a related process in other circumstances makes a rainbow). The rays of the sun are reflected most strongly at or near the point that's exactly opposite the sun. As your head's in the way, the brightness is visible around the edges of its shadow. You can see it best if you move your head a little, because the increased brightness moves with you. Only you can see it; other people with you will each have one of their own which, likewise, you can't see.

The word first appears in this sense in German in 1834, in a book with the title Abhandlung über der Heiligenschein (Treatise on the Halo), in which Dr C Garthe wrote on the phenomenon. When writers in English followed it up, they naturally borrowed his name for it.

This is a rare appearance outside books on optics:

With the sun behind him, the shadows were flattened,
or disappeared altogether, as if he was looking down at
the bleached floor of some dead ocean. In fact, when the
sun was right behind him, the lunar landscape seemed to
brighten suddenly. _Heiligenschein_, the lunar scientists
called it. The saint's halo: some obscure effect of the dust.
[Moonseed, by Stephen Baxter, 1998. The effect here, a
real one noticed by astronauts, is caused by glassy
volcanic beads within the lunar dust.]

A related optical effect, but like a circular rainbow, is called a glory. You can sometimes spot it if you're looking out of a plane's window at its shadow cast on a cloud. Natural phenomena like the famous Spectre of the Brocken, an extended shadow of a person cast on fog or cloud from a high place when the sun is low in the sky, often have a glory around the person's head.

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WORLD WIDE WORDS
Copyright (c) Michael B. Quinion 2009. You may reproduce this mailing in whole or in part in other free media provided that you acknowledge the source and quote the Web address of "http://www.worldwidewords.org".

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Article – Five Secrets to Getting Organized

One of the biggest challenges in organizing a mess is figuring out where to start. Without a game plan, you're likely to become overwhelmed and then nothing gets done. Use these five secrets to help you get started.

http://www.businessknowhow.com/homeoffice/orgsecrets.htm

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Special Dates – Something to Celebrate Each Day

7 January
1789: The first U.S. presidential election was held. Americans voted for electors who, a month later, chose George Washington to be the nation's first president.
1800: Millard Fillmore, 13th President of the United States, born at Locke, New York.
1912: Charles Samuel Addams, American cartoonist, born at Westfield, New Jersey. Addams's work appeared regularly in The New Yorker magazine, to which he eventually contributed more than 1,300 cartoons. Members of a ghoulish family were recurring figures in his subject matter. Famed for their wit, fantasy, and sense of the macabre, his cartoons are collected in Drawn and Quartered (1942), Addams and Evil (1947), Monster Rally (1950), Home Bodies (1954), Black Maria (1960), Charles Addams' Mother Goose (1967), My Crowd (1970), and The World of Charles Addams (1991). Addams's characters also have been the basis for television series and motion pictures.

8 January
1982: The U.S. telephone system is opened to competition when the American Telephone and Telegraph Company (AT&T) monopoly is broken up.
1942: Stephen William Hawking, British theoretical physicist, born at Oxford, England. In 1971 Hawking provided mathematical support for the big-bang theory of the origin of the universe; he showed that if the general theory of relativity was correct the universe must have a singularity, or starting point, in space-time. He wrote an explanation of his work that became a popular bestseller, A Brief History of Time: From the Big Bang to Black Holes (1988). He has also published Superspace and Supergravity (1981), The Very Early Universe (1983), Black Holes and Baby Universes and Other Essays (1993), and The Nature of Space and Time (1995).

9 January
1913: Richard Milhous Nixon, 37th President of the United States, born at Yerba Linda, California.
1951: The United Nations headquarters officially opens in New York City.

10 January
1863: The "Metro," the world's first underground railroad/subway, opens to the public in London.

11 January
1755 (or 1757): Alexander Hamilton, lawyer, first secretary of the U.S. Treasury, leader of the Federalist Party, born at Nevis, West Indies.
1902: Popular Mechanics magazine was published for the first time.

12 January
1773: The first public museum in America was established, in Charleston, S.C.
1923: Ira Hamilton Hayes, one of the six men in the Rosenthal photo of the Iwo Jima flag raising, born at Gila River Indian Reservation, Arizona.

13 January
1794: President George Washington approved a measure adding two stars and two stripes to the American flag, following the admission of Vermont and Kentucky to the union. (The number of stripes was, of course, later returned to 13)

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Humor – British and Americans

The Japanese eat very little fat and suffer fewer heart attacks than the British or Americans.

The French eat a lot of fat and also suffer fewer heart attacks than the British or Americans.

The Japanese drink very little red wine and suffer fewer heart attacks than the British or Americans.

The Italians drink excessive amounts of red wine and also suffer fewer heart attacks than the British or Americans.

The Germans drink a lot of beers and eat lots of sausages and fats and suffer fewer heart attacks than the British or Americans.

Conclusion: Eat and drink what you like. Speaking English is apparently what kills you.

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Thoughts – The United States

“Whatever America hopes to bring to pass in the world must first come to pass in the heart of America.”

– Dwight D. Eisenhower (1890–1969), 34th President of the United States

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In Closing

Keep smiling; have fun!

– Paul