On This Day:
Monday January 13, 2014 This is the 13th day of the year, with 352 days remaining in 2014. Fact of the Day: accents and diacritical marks Accents and diacritical marks (also known as diacritics) are characters used in writing to indicate a special phonetic (vocal sound) quality for a given alphabetical character. They occur mostly in foreign languages, but we have imported a fair number of foreign words into English. These keep their diacritical marks for a while, but as the words are naturalized into English the accents and diacritical marks fall into disuse. Nowadays, nobody writes hôtel, but we do still write résumé.
Holidays Feast day of St. Hilary of Poitiers, St. Agrecius, and St. Berno.
Sweden: St. Knut's Day
Switzerland: Silvesterklause or Meitlisunntig.
Norway: Tyvendedagen or tjugandedagen
Togo: National Liberation Day.
Russia: Old New Year's Eve.
Events 1893 - Britain's Independent Labor Party (a precursor to the current Labor Party) held its first meeting. It was formed by Keir Hardie.
1910 - Opera was broadcast on the radio for the first time - Enrico Caruso singing from the stage of New York's Metropolitan Opera House.
1931 - The bridge connecting New York and New Jersey was named the George Washington Memorial Bridge.
1955 - Chase National and the Bank of Manhattan agreed to merge, resulting in the second largest U.S. bank.
1964 - Capitol Records released the Beatles' first single in the USA; "I Wanna Hold Your Hand" sold one million copies in the first three weeks.
1966 - Robert C. Weaver was appointed to the U.S. cabinet as Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, becoming the first African-American to attain an executive-branch post.
1990 - L. Douglas Wilder of Virginia took the oath of office, becoming the nation's first elected black governor.
1992 - Japan apologized for forcing tens of thousands of Korean women to serve as sex slaves for Japanese soldiers during World War II.
2000 - Microsoft chairman Bill Gates stepped aside as chief executive and promoted company president Steve Ballmer to the position.
Births 1808 - Salmon P. Chase, U.S. Treasury Secretary, sixth Chief Justice of the Supreme Court.
1834 - Horatio Alger, American author.
1884 - Sophie Tucker, American vaudeville singer.
1885 - Alfred Fuller, American businessman, founder of Fuller Brush Company.
1926 - Michael Bond, English author, creator of the Paddington Bear stories.
Deaths 1941 - James Joyce, Irish novelist.
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