Tommy Contest Page 5
of the River Region
April 23, 2019 Published by PTK Corp.
The Neatest Little Paper Ever Read® To place an Ad, call: (334) 452-9296 TIDBITS® USES
PUNCTUATION by Janet Spencer
Come along with Tidbits as we punctuate! LITTLE DOTS • Aristophanes of Byzantium was a librarian at the Egyptian library of Alexandria in the third century B.C. when he noticed a problem with the current method of writing. At the time, writing was done on scrolls. The characters would run left to right on one line, then right to left on the next line, continuing in this zigzag pattern to the end. There were no spaces or breaks in between the words or separating the sentences. People trying to read these scrolls out loud had a hard time. Aristophanes invented a simple system of dots to indicate pauses and phrases in order to make scrolls easier to read aloud. • A dot in the middle of the line indicated a place where someone reading out loud should pause to take a breath, and it was called a “komma,” the Greek word meaning “clause.” A dot at the bottom of the line indicated where a reader should take a longer pause. It was called a “kolon” meaning “verse” and indicated a break in between two clauses. A dot at the top of the line was called a “periodos” meaning “segment” and indicated a full-stop pause at the conclusion of the written sentence. This system of dots became our comma, colon, and period. It was the first punctuation. • In the years before there were spaces placed between letters, a small curved mark would often be placed underneath letters to indicate which word they belonged to where it would otherwise cause confusion. For example, “susanalbumparty” is confusing until marks are added to indicate which letters belong to which words: “susan‿album‿party.” The Greek word “hypo” means “under” (as in “hypodermic” (Continued next page)
Vol 8 Issue 17 shannon@riverregiontidbits.com
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Tidbits® of the River Region (Front page continued)
1. Is the book of Hosea in the Old or New Testament or neither? 2. How many Old Testament (KJV) books are named for a woman? There are none in the New Testament. 0, 1, 2, 3 3. From Judges 16, what had Samson been to God from his mother’s womb? Nazarite, Philistine, Reubenite, Protestant 4. In Exodus 4, who had a staff or rod that turned into a snake? Noah, Aaron, Adam, Moses 5. What biblical name means “peace”? Salome, Jacob, Abraham, Adam 6. Of these, who died on Mount Hor? Paul, Noah, Aaron, Solomon Sharpen your understanding of scripture with Wilson’s Casey’s book “Test Your Bible Knowledge,” available in bookstores and online. (c) 2019 King Features Synd., Inc.
meaning “under the skin”) and “hen” means “one.” This is the origin of the hyphen, a mark originally underneath a word, now located right in-between words. • It wasn’t until the 8th century that writers began adding spaces in between words, largely in response to the difficulty that Irish and Scottish monks had when they were copying Bibles written in Latin without knowing Latin themselves. • Charlemagne commissioned scholars to make reading and writing easier for the proletariat, and that’s when upper case and lower case letters were invented. • A particular typeface is called a “font” from the French word “fonte” meaning “to melt” or “to pour out.” This is the same root word for “fountain,” “foundry,” and “fondue.” In the early days of printing, and later when typewriters were invented, the letters were made of metal, with molten metal being poured into molds to create individual letters in an entire collection of moveable type. • Printers kept their different fonts inside cases. Capital letters were put in the top part of the case, leading to the terms “upper case” and “lower case.” • The exclamation point comes from the Latin word “io,” meaning “an exclamation of joy.” It was written vertically within a single space, with a lowercase I over a lowercase O. Eventually the O was abbreviated to a dot and the exclamation point was born! SQUIGGLES and TITTLES • In Latin, when they wrote a query, they’d finish it with the word “questio” which was abbreviated “qo.” Eventually, they put the abbreviation into a single space, with the lowercase “q” on top of the lowercase “O.” As time went on, people made the “q” a tailed loop, and the O turned into a dot. This turned into the question mark. • The tilde is a squiggly line ~ whose name comes from the Latin “titulus” meaning “title.” The tilde means “approximately”: ~42 means “approximately 42.” • In the Roman language, “libra pondo” meant one pound in weight, where “libra” meant “scales” and “pondo” came from “pendere” meaning “to weigh.” The Romans abbreviated “libra pondo” as “lb” with a line drawn horizontally through the two letters at the top. The little line is called a “tittle,” which indicates an abbreviation. Eventually, it became easier just to write the symbol “#” instead of spelling out the two letters lb and drawing a line through them. Today we still abbreviate pound as “lb” and the hashtag # originally designated weight in pounds. • The term “libra pondo” expanded into other languages, becoming the French “livre,” the Italian “lira,” the British “pound,” and the German “pfund.” Charlemagne decreed that a single pound of silver should be minted into 240 coins, and today Britain still counts its money in pounds sterling, abbreviated as the stylized L that hearkens back to libra pondo: £ with the “L” standing for “libra” and the tittle indicating an abbreviation. • The # symbol is known variously as the pound sign, the number sign, or a hashtag, but its official name is “octothorpe.” The “octo” denotes the eight points, and “thorpe” comes from the Old English word meaning village. This is because the symbol (Continued next page)
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resembles eight villager’s fields surrounding a village square. • Greek and Roman merchants shipped goods such as grain, olives, wine, and oil in vase-like vessels called “amphora.” An amphora indicated not only the container but also the weight of the goods inside the container. The word derives from the Greek terms “amphi” meaning “on both sides,” indicating the two handles on the container, and “phoreus” meaning “carrier.” It was customary to abbreviate any word with the first letter of that word combined with a tittle to indicate an abbreviation. So the abbreviation for how many amphorae of goods had been delivered would have looked like this: ā. Through sloppy handwriting done in a rush, it eventually started to be written as @. The @ sign became universally used by merchants meaning “at the rate of,” such as: “John bought 13 kegs of apples @ $20 per keg.” • In 1971 when an engineer was working on developing the world’s first e-mail system, he needed a symbol to separate the name of the sender from the name of the system. He chose the “@” symbol because it was not commonly used. The symbol doesn’t have a name other than “the ‘at’ symbol” or “the commercial ‘at’” but in other languages it’s referred to as “elephant’s trunk” in Swedish; “monkey’s tail” in Dutch; “spider monkey” in German; and “strudel” in Hebrew. • The Latin word for “and” is “et.” Scribes abbreviated “et” with a stylized rounded capital E that looked like a backwards 3, plus an overlapping small case letter “t.” This symbol eventually morphed into the ampersand symbol: “&”. The word “ampersand” derives from the Latin phrase “per se” meaning “by itself” combined with the word “and.” Throughout the 1800s, the ampersand sign was treated as the 27th letter of the alphabet. Schoolchildren reciting the alphabet would follow “X Y Z” with “and, per se, And” denoting the symbol &.
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Tidbits® of the River Region
REMARKABLE PEOPLE:
NOAH WEBSTER • Noah Webster was born in Connecticut in 1758, not long before the American Colonies started to agitate for freedom from England. He attended an overcrowded one-room schoolhouse. It was a miserable experience for him that colored his opinion of the school system for the rest of his life. Still, he managed to graduate from Yale in 1778, after taking some time out from his studies to fight in the Revolutionary War. • Next, he became a lawyer but couldn’t find enough work. He became a school master instead. Now he was back to remembering all the problems with the American school system: crowded classes, low pay, and poor teaching materials. One of his biggest issues was that the only text books the students had access to were all published in England. They glorified English culture while ignoring all things American, and they adhered to confusing and archaic spelling rules followed by the English aristocracy. Webster thought that American schoolchildren should learn from American books written by American authors. Since there were none available, he set out to write them himself. • He subsequently published a three-volume set: a spelling book published in 1783, a grammar book published in 1784, and a reader published in 1785. • Webster’s “American Spelling Book” was arranged to teach students in an easy, organized progression: it started with the alphabet; moved into the phonetics of sounding out vowels, consonants, and syllables; proceeded into a series of increasingly complex words; and concluded with simple sentences. This was a revolutionary new approach. • For the next one hundred years, Webster’s book was the top-selling American book. It (Continued next page)
Outstanding Warrants:
Laws, Yusef Jabari DOB: 04/16/1974 Black/Female 5’3” 150 lbs Hair: Black Eyes: Brown
Theft of Property 2nd
by Samantha Weaver * It was 19th-century French novelist Gustave Flaubert who made the following sage observation: “Our ignorance of history makes us libel our own times. People have always been like this.” * Visitors to Chicago might want to keep in mind that in that city, it’s against the law to dine in any establishment that is on fire. * In 1856, a soldier of fortune (who was also a journalist, doctor and lawyer) by the name of William Walker and his hand-picked group of mercenaries took over Nicaragua. Walker appointed himself dictator, thus securing for himself the distinction of being the only nativeborn American citizen to become head of state of a foreign nation. * If you’re like the average American, you consumed more than 250 eggs last year. * You might be surprised to learn that the giant bullfrogs of South Africa have sometimes been known to attack lions. * If you like to go out and hit the greens on a nice summer day, you might want to consider this fact the next time you’re thinking about breaking out the irons and putters: More people are struck by lightning on golf courses than anywhere else. * Mike Edwards, one of the founding members of the British band Electric Light Orchestra, met with an untimely death decades after he left the group. In 2010, as Edwards was driving in the rural southwest of England, a farmer lost control of a 1,300-pound bale of hay. This wheel-shaped bale rolled down a hill and over a hedge, and just happened to smash into the van Edwards was driving. *** Thought for the Day: “I am prepared to meet my Maker. Whether my Maker is prepared for the great ordeal of meeting me is another matter.” -- Sir Winston Churchill (c) 2019 King Features Synd., Inc.
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sold 15 million copies by 1837, and 60 million by 1890. Over the course of his lifetime, 385 editions were published. Webster received one-half cent in royalties for every copy sold. This income allowed him to pursue his other passion: spelling reform. • Webster felt that language was constantly evolving, and spelling should evolve too. He was tired of the confusing British method of spelling. He set out to standardize the American lexicon, since Americans spoke many dialects in which they spelled, pronounced, and used words differently. Webster learned to speak 28 languages so he could understand the origins of language. He then spent the next 20 years assembling the first American language dictionary, in which he instigated sweeping spelling reforms. • Webster changed “c” to “s” in many words like “defense”; swapped “re” for “er” in words like “center”; turned “ou” into “o” in words like “favor”; and dropped double consonants in words like “traveling”. “Plough” became “plow”; “draught” turned into “draft”; and “publick” became “public.” Other reformed words failed to catch on: “wimmen” and “tung” and “masheen.” He also added entirely new, all-American words such as skunk, hickory, and chowder. • When his dictionary was published in 1806, it sold only 2,500 copies. He began work on a new, improved dictionary but was forced to mortgage his home to raise funds, and was thereafter plagued with debt for the rest of his life. Noah Webster died in 1843, two years after the 3rd edition of his dictionary was published. Webster’s passion for spelling resulted in the creation of a popular new contest known as the spelling bee.
By Chris Richcreek
1. When was the last time before 2018 (Boston) that a major-league team won 105 or more games in a season? 2. In 2017, Minnesota’s Paul Molitor became the second Hall of Fame player to win a Manager of the Year award. Who was the first? 3. In 2017, the Jacksonville Jaguars became the third NFL team to record 10 or more sacks in a game twice in a season. Name either of the first two teams to do it. 4. Name either of the two men’s basketball players who were named Big Ten freshman of the year and Big Ten defensive player of the year in the same season. 5. Patrick Kane set the mark for the Chicago Blackhawks in the 2018-19 season for most consecutive games with an assist (17). Who had held the record? 6. Josef Martinez set a Major League Soccer record in 2018 for most career hat tricks (six). Who had he been tied with? 7. Who was the last undisputed boxing champion of the cruiserweight division before Oleksandr Usyk in 2018? (c) 2019 King Features Syndicate, Inc.
Willie Cole Please call 334-452-9296 within 7 days of this issue to claim your prize!
Tommy Count ______
This week’s winner receives
2 Dozen Glazed Doughnuts from
Krispy Kreme Doughnuts Register to win by sending an email to entertommycontest@gmail.com or USPS to PTK Corp., PO Box 264, Wetumpka, AL 36092 with the following information: 1) Your name (first and last), and, 2) the number of times you find Tommy in the ads in the paper. From the correct entries a winner will be selected. You must be 18 years of age to qualify. The gift certificates will range in value from $25 to $100 each week. Entries must be received by midnight each Friday evening. Last Week’s Ads where Tommy was hiding: 1. Farmers Feed Service Inc, p.1 2. Mark’s Service Center & Body Shop Inc, p.5 3. Community Expo, p.8
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TidbitsÂŽ of the River Region
Credit Cards Now Accepted
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NAMES OF COUNTRIES
BIBLE TRIVIA ANSWERS:
1) Old; 2) 2 (Ruth and Esther); 3) Nazarite; 4) Moses; 5) Salome; 6) Aaron
1. The St. Louis Cardinals won 105 games in 2004. 2. Baltimore’s Frank Robinson, in 1989. 3. The 1967 Oakland Raiders and the 1984 Chicago Bears. 4. Jaren Jackson of Michigan State in 2018 and Greg Oden of Ohio State in 2007. 5. Stan Mikita, who did it for 14 consecutive games in 1967. 6. Stern John and Diego Serna. 7. O’Neil Bell, in 2006.
• Simón Bolívar was a Venezuelan military leader who fought in the Spanish American wars of independence. Bolivia is now named after him. • Colombia was named after Christopher Columbus. • The word “America” springs from the name of Italian explorer and cartographer Amerigo Vespucci, the person credited with realizing that the continent the Europeans bumped into in the late 1400s was not India. • France comes from the old Germanic word “frankon” which meant a javelin or a lance, but it’s not certain whether the weapon’s name came from the name of the people, or if the people were named for the weapon. • The Greeks, suspecting there was a land down under, called it Terra Australis Incognita, meaning “unknown southern land” which became Australia. • Sierra Leone means literally “lion mountains” in Spanish, named by Portuguese explorer Pedro de Sintra in 1462. • The Tuareg tribe inhabits the regions around the Sahara Desert. Their word “aginaw” means “black people” and turned into “Guinea.” The Malaysian word “pepuah” meaning “frizzy hair” is likely to be the origin of “papua” giving us Papua New Guinea. • The Arabic words “al-Jazair” means “the islands” referring to several small islands that were once located in the bay of what is now called Algeria. • Although there are about 25 countries named after men, there are few named after women, one being St. Lucia, a Caribbean island named for Saint Lucy, a Christian martyr who was murdered around the year 300 A.D. • The Philippines are named after Spain’s 16th-century King Philip II. • Swaziland is named for the Swazi people, who are said to get their name from the 19thcentury king Mswati II. • Tobago comes from the Carib word “tavaco” denoting the pipe in which they smoked tobacco leaves. • While on an expedition along the coast of South America, Amerigo Vespucci saw houses built over the water, which reminded him of Venice, so he named the land Venezuela. • The Huron-Iroquois word “kanata” meaning “village” or “settlement” gave us Canada. • Liberia comes from the Latin word “libre” meaning “free.” • The Indo-European word “alb” meaning “mountain” gives us Albania. • The Spanish word “argentine” means “silvery” and resulted in Argentina, a land where Spanish explorers noted that the natives wore much silver jewelry. • The Spanish phrase “baja mar” means “shallow sea” and may be the origin of the Bahamas. • Barbados is a Spanish word meaning “bearded.” • The German word “kamerun” means “shrimp” and Cameroon is a place where many shrimp were found. • The African Kanuri tribe’s word meaning “lake” is “tsade” which became Chad. • Costa Rica means “rich coast” in Spanish. • Nauru, an island northeast of Australia, is reportedly named after the indigenous word “anáoero,” meaning “I go to the beach.”
* On April 23, 1014, Brian Boru, the high king of Ireland, is assassinated by retreating Norsemen shortly after his Irish forces defeated them. A small group of fleeing Norsemen stumbled on Brian’s tent, overcame his bodyguards and murdered the elderly king. * On April 25, 1719, Daniel Defoe’s “The Life and Strange Adventures of Robinson Crusoe,” a fictional work about a shipwrecked sailor who spends 28 years on a deserted island, is published. It’s based on the experiences of Alexander Selkirk, a Scottish sailor who spent four years on a small island off South America. * On April 26, 1865, John Wilkes Booth is killed when Union soldiers track him to a Virginia farm 12 days after he assassinated President Abraham Lincoln. Killing Lincoln was part of a conspiracy to simultaneously kill the vice president and secretary of state, neither of which happened. * On April 22, 1915, German forces shock Allied soldiers along the Western Front by firing more than 150 tons of lethal chlorine. The Germans were perhaps as shocked as the Allies by the devastating effects of the poison gas. * On April 27, 1956, world heavyweight champion Rocky Marciano retires from boxing at age 31. He ended his career as the only heavyweight champ with a perfect record, 49-0. Marciano had started boxing in the Army to get out of kitchen duty. * On April 28, 1969, following the defeat of his proposals for constitutional reform, Charles de Gaulle resigns as president of France. He had first resigned in 1946, but was called back in 1958 when the Algerian War sent nearly a million Algerians into France. * On April 24, 1996, the Pittsburgh Penguins beat the Washington Capitals, 3-2, in 139 minutes of game play, making it the fifthlongest match in NHL history. Playoff games aren’t allowed to end in a tie. (c) 2019 Hearst Communications, Inc. All Rights Reserved
Tidbits® of the River Region
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