QUOTES
OF THE WEEK
“Life is too important to be taken seriously.”
—Oscar Wilde
“Never take anybody’s advice.”
—George Bernard
Shaw
“Vision is the art of seeing things invisible.”
—Jonathan
Swift
“The intellect of man is forced to choose
Perfection of the life, or of the work,
And if it take the second must refuse
A heavenly mansion, raging in the dark.”
—W.B. Yeats, from “The Choice”
THIS
WEEK IN  HISTORY
SEPTEMBER
1, 1985: A joint Franco-American expedition led by
Jean-Louis Michel and Dr. Robert Ballard locates the wreck
of the RMS Titanic after a 56-day
search. The Titanic, which sank
famously 73 years earlier after striking an iceberg, was discovered
350 miles southeast of Nova Scotia, 13 nautical miles from
where it was originally thought to lie, at a depth of 3,800
meters (12,500 feet).
Credit for the discovery
was given to Dr. Ballard, who for at least a dozen years had
made the discovery of Titanic a
personal obsession. His first attempt to locate the wreck
was in 1977, when he used a drilling ship belonging to the
Alcoa Aluminum Company, the Alcoa Seaprobe.
Unfortunately, Ballard’s maiden attempt was a failure;
the cumbersome steel pipes, which were lowered through the
bottom of the vessel, snapped off and crashed to the sea floor,
taking Ballard’s equipment with them. It was not until
1985, when technology had advanced sufficiently, that Ballard
got another chance. With the aid of a video camera sled named
Argo, which was towed a few feet
above the ocean floor, Ballard and his team located a debris
field and eventually came upon one of the ship’s boilers.
His discovery made instant headlines in newspapers around
the world. He returned the following summer to take additional
footage, and snapped over 60,000 photographs of the wreckage.
Source: titanic-titanic.com.
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3
WORDS
Memorize these by week's end and you shall
quickly develop an enviable lexicon.
This week’s theme: little-known words that ought to
be used more often.
| fuliginous
(fyoo-LI-juh-nus) adjective |
| 1. |
|
sooty,
obscure, murky |
| 2. |
|
having a dark or dusky color |
Ex.
At the height of the Industrial Revolution, London
was perhaps the most fuliginous
city on earth. |
Ex.
2. The mountains were obscured in
a fuliginous mantle
of storm.
Etym. From the Latin
fuligo, “soot.” |
|
oneiric (o-NIGH-rik) adjective |
| 1. |
|
of or relating to dreams; DREAMY |
Ex.
Salvador Dali was a master of oneiric
landscapes. |
Ex.
2. The warm rays of the sun and
the subtle buzzing of insects cast an oneiric
haze over the whole afternoon. |
|
obnubilate (aub-NOO-bi-late) verb |
| 1. |
|
to
becloud or obscure |
Ex.
The judge’s ruling included excessive amounts
of dicta, which did nothing but obnubilate
his main points. |
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