On This Day:
Friday May 23, 2014 This is the 143rd day of the year, with 222 days remaining in 2014. Fact of the Day: word games Playing with words is a distinctly human activity. It lets us learn while having fun, and is a humbler and more approachable way to be creative than writing the Great American Novel. We make new sense or nonsense by playing with the basic elements of our language - noticing similarities between different words, finding double meanings in the same word, and using words as the raw material for innumerable games. Words are pulled to pieces and rearranged in anagrams and palindromes, or linked together in diagrams or patterns such as acrostics, crosswords, Scrabble, and word squares. Some games play with individual letters (as in chronograms and beheadments), their shape (concrete poetry), or sound (rebuses and tongue-twisters). Other games, such as charades and hangman, involve guessing.
Holidays Feast day of Saints Montanus and Lucius, St. William of Rochester, St. Aldhelm, St. Euphrosyne of Polotsk, St. Ivo of Chartres, St. Leontius of Rostov, St. Desiderius of Vienne, and St. John Baptist dei Rossi.
Morocco: National Day.
Sweden: Linnaeus Day.
Events 1430 - Joan of Arc was captured by the Burgundians, who sold her to the English.
1533 - Henry VIII's marriage to Catherine of Aragon was declared null and void.
1785 - Benjamin Franklin announced his invention of bifocals.
1788 - South Carolina became the eighth state to ratify the Constitution of the United States of America.
1865 - The Army of the Potomac celebrated the end of the Civil War by parading down Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, D.C.
1911 - President William Howard Taft dedicated the New York Public Library, the largest marble structure ever constructed in the United States.
1915 - Italy declared war on Austria-Hungary in World War I.
1934 - Nylon was first produced by Dr. Wallace Carothers, a chemist at Du Pont.
1935 - The first major league night baseball game played under lights occurred, in Cincinnati, Ohio between the Cincinnati Reds and Philadelphia Phillies.
1949 - The Federal Republic of Germany (West Germany) came into being, with its capital at Bonn.
1960 - Israel announced the arrest (after abduction in Argentina) of Adolf Eichmann, who had been responsible for organizing the Germans' mass extermination of Jews in World War II.
Births 1335 - Tamerlane the Great, Mongol leader.
1707 - Carolus Linnaeus (Carl von Linné), Swedish botanist.
1734 - Friedrich Anton Mesmer, Viennese physician and hypnotist.
1848 - Otto Lilienthal, German aviator.
1875 - Alfred Sloan, American philanthropist who headed General Motors for more than 25 years.
1883 - Douglas Fairbanks (Julius Ullman), American actor.
1910 - Scatman (Benjamin) Crothers, entertainer.
1910 - Artie Shaw, American bandleader and clarinetist.
1928 - Rosemary Clooney, American singer, actress.
1934 - Robert A. Moog, American electrical engineer, creator of the synthesizer.
1958 - Drew Carey, American actor and comedian.
1974 - Ken Jennings, holds the record for the longest winning streak on the U.S. syndicated game show Jeopardy!.
1974 - Jewel (born Jewel Kilcher), American singer and songwriter.
Deaths 1701 - Captain William Kidd, Scottish pirate, hanged on the banks of the River Thames.
1934 - Bank robbers Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker, shot to death in a police ambush in Gibsland, Louisiana.
1937 - John D. Rockefeller, American industrialist and philanthropist.
1945 - Heinrich Himmler, commander of the German Schutzstaffel (SS) and one of the most powerful men in Nazi Germany.
2002 - Sam Snead, American golfer.
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