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1961/ 'Dord' is a non-existent
word that was entered into the second edition of Webster's
New International Dictionary by mistake.
1962/ In the book, Secrets
of the Soil, Dr. Joseph Weissman , UCLA College of Medicine,
says human breast milk could not be sold in stores due to
the fact that 99% of mothers' milk contains dangerous levels
of DDT.
1963/ A nova is a sudden
increase in luminosity of a star, usually in the magnitide
of thousands of times its original brightness. Stars that
nova usually return to their original luminosity
1964/ President Woodrow
Wilson used the spelling OKEH rather than OK. He preferred
this spelling, believing (incorrectly) that the origin of
the word is a Choctaw word meaning "it is so."
1965/ One Thousand contains
the letter A, but none of the words from one to nine hundred
ninety-nine has an A. According to Pascal Kaeser, in these
languages you can count until one million (and more), without
using the vowel e: Aymara, Chichewa, Haoussa, Ouigour. These
languages are officially written with the Latin alphabet.
1966/ Amount of money
spent by Americans on lawn care aid annually: $6 billion.
1967/ The United States
Department of Agriculture reported that in 1997, half of U.S.
farm production came from only 2% of farms.
1968/ Stars twinkle because
the light we see coming from the stars travels through the
atmosphere around the earth and there is turbulence in the
Earth's atmosphere.
1969/ OUGH can be pronounced
9 different ways in the following sentence. "A rough-coated,
dough-faced, thoughtful ploughman strode through the streets
of Scarborough; after falling into a slough, he coughed, houghed,
and hiccoughed."
1970/ Coffee is the second
largest traded commodity after oil.
1971/ PARADIGM was the
word most frequently looked up in 1998 in the Merriam-Webster
on-line dictionary.
1972/ Q is the only letter
that does not occur in the names of the states of the U.S.
1973/ TAXI is spelled
the same way in thirteen languages, English, French, German,
Swedish, Spanish, Danish, Norwegian, Dutch, Czech, Slovak,
Hungarian, Romanian and Portuguese.
1974/ In all of Shakespeare's
plays and poetry, excluding Roman numerals, only one word
begins with X. The word is XANTHIPPE (the wife of Socrates).
It is found in The Taming of the Shrew.
1975/ The words most
likely to be misspelled (ratio of incorrect to correct spellings)
according to a study of Usenet traffic several years ago were
DUMBBELL, OCCURRENCE, MEMENTO, FRUSTUM, COLLECTIBLE, AMATEUR,
DAIQUIRI, PASTIME, ACCIDENTALLY, PLAYWRIGHT, EMBARRASS, ACQUIT,
HARASS, and PRONUNCIATION.
1976/ It is suspected
that 80 percent of Mercury's core is iron-nickel, as compared
with Earth's 32 percent.
1977/ Pangrams are sentences
containing all the letters of the alphabet.
1978/ The highest-scoring
opening plays in scrabble are MUZJIKS (128), QUARTZY (126)
or SQUEEZY (126).
1979/ The two longest
words in the Bible have 18 letters each. MAHER-SHALAL-HASH-BAZ
(Isaiah 8:1) is the name given to Isaiah's son, meaning "swift
is booty, speedy is prey." JONATH-ELEM-RECHO-KIM, which
is found in the title of Psalm 56, is the name of a song and
means "the silent dove of far-off places"
1980/ Uranus is unique
among the planets in that its equitorial plane is almost perpendicular
to the orbital plane.
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