So, I learned yesterday that citrus is a hesperidium, which in turn is a berry with a leathery skin. Furthermore, the pulp bits of citrus – the fluid filled sacs – are called “vesicles”, while the triangular segments are call carpels. All this and much here can be found here.
I learned today that there are a number of official styles for documenting citations in scholarly works, as well as formatting such works. The style that I am presently trying to better understand and apply is the MLA style.
MLA stands for “Modern Language Association”. Here’s an excerpt from the MLA web site about their style:
All fields of research agree on the need to document scholarly borrowings, but documentation conventions vary because of the different needs of scholarly disciplines. MLA style for documentation is widely used in the humanities, especially in writing on language and literature. Generally simpler and more concise than other styles, MLA style features brief parenthetical citations in the text keyed to an alphabetical list of works cited that appears at the end of the work.
I stumbled across a Word-A-Day web site today – courtesy of Wordsmith.org. The word of the day today is “fluvial”, a word I have previously heard but not known the exact definition for. Courtesy of WordSmith.org, here is everything about “fluvial”:
PRONUNCIATION: (FLOO-vee-uhl)
MEANING: Of or relating to a river or stream.
ETYMOLOGY: From Latin fluvius (river), from fluere (to flow). Ultimately from the Indo-European root bhleu- (to swell or overflow), from which flow words such as affluent, influence, influenza, fluctuate, fluent, fluid, fluoride, flush, flux, reflux, and superfluous.
USAGE: ”Our fiesta celebration featured a fluvial procession on the Marikina and Pasig Rivers.” Jaime Laya; A Manila-Marikina-Valencia Connection; Manila Bulletin (Philippines); May 16, 2010.
Yesterdays’ word was “rotund”. I’m unfortunately quite familiar with that word.
I have used the term “red letter day” numerous times in my life, without truly knowing its origin. I finally looked it up, and it turns out that a red letter day was one annotated in red in illuminated scripts in the middle ages:
The term came into wider use in 1549 when the first Book of Common Prayer included a calendar with holy days marked in red ink. For example, Annunciation (Lady Day), 25th March, was designated in the book as a red-letter day.
Pretty interesting, if you ask me!
(Source: http://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/red-letter-day.html)
I had always been under the impression that Moroccan cuisine is frequently done using a conical vessel which is called a “tangine”. Apparently I was spelling it wrong all along. It’s “tajine” or “tagine” (no “n” before the “g”). Source
I learned yesterday that “Thank You” in Vietnamese sounds very similar to “Come On”. It’s spelled “cảm ơn”.