Word: trivia
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Guinness Book of Records was started in 1955 by a beer company hoping to settle pub arguments. But the true genius behind the book was NORRIS MCWHIRTER, a former athlete and sports reporter who possessed one of the world's most prodigious memories for trivia. McWhirter, who died playing tennis in Wiltshire, England, last week at the age of 78, edited the book through 1986 and established the rigorous record-screening procedures that made it an authoritative guide to natural phenomena, sports records and dubious human endeavors, such as holding 109 live bees in your mouth...
With so little time remaining before the scheduled unveiling date of May 29, speedy coordination between the City and the Kennedy Corporation over the design is necessary. Without this planning, the Kennedy Library will be just a collection of fond trivia -- a valentine from Caroline, a coconut shell from PT 109, an ivory model boat from Nikita Khrushchev -- within a Harvard Square disrupted by tourists clicking their Instamatics...
With so little time remaining before the scheduled unveiling date of May 29, speedy coordination between the City and the Kennedy Corporation over the design is necessary. Without this planning, the Kennedy Library will be just a collection of fond trivia -- a valentine from Caroline, a coconut shell from PT 109, an ivory model boat from Nikita Khrushchev -- within a Harvard Square disrupted by tourists clicking their Instamatics...
...answer to the secret of life. Until that happens, one’s understanding of the phrase inscribed on Dexter Gate (“Enter to grow in wisdom/Depart to better serve thy country and thy kind”) is pretty straightforward: Enter to expand your knowledge of useless trivia. Depart to better promote the wonders of this University to the world. Seriously, this place owes one a stipend as a tour guide...
...British public schools around 1920, though society portraitist Cecil Beaton preferred his subjects to mouth the word "lesbian." Just as perverse, the French often opt for "le petit oiseau va sortir," Spaniards say "patata," while the Japanese have adopted the English term "whisky." As the relator of such delightful trivia, the latest elicitor of the smile is author Angus Trumble, whose A Brief History of the Smile (Basic Books; 226 pages) produces an abundance of them. Begun as a speech delivered to the Royal Australasian College of Dental Surgeons in 1998, Trumble's book artfully deconstructs the smile "into more...