ON THIS DAY
July 26, 2018
JULY 26, 1961
PUBLIC decency in dress is to be enforced at St Helier, Jersey. The police chief said it may be necessary to ban women in bathing suits and shirtless men from the streets.
JULY 26, 1966
FAMILY doctors have been urged by the Health Ministry to stop writing prescriptions in pidgin Latin and to use plain English instead. So will become ‘aspirin mixture’ — and will be replaced by ‘eye ointments’.
HAPPY BIRTHDAY
DAME HELEN MIRREN, 73, right. The Oscarwinning actress, born Ilyena Lydia Vasilievna Mironoff in London, was raised in Essex and once worked as a ‘blagger’ attracting punters on to rides at Southend’s Kursaal funfair. In her first talk-show interview in 1975, Michael Parkinson introduced her thus: ‘She is especially telling in projecting sluttish eroticism.’ She said later: ‘He was such a f***ing sexist old fart.’
MICK JAGGER, 75. The Rolling Stones singer is said to curse any sports team he predicts will win, earning him the Brazilian nickname ‘Pe Frio’, meaning cold foot. He was watching when England lost to Croatia in extra time in this month’s World Cup.
BORN ON THIS DAY
JOE JACKSON (19282018). The father of 11 (including Michael, the rest of The Jackson 5, La Toya and Janet) was a music manager who steered his children to fame, but they had mixed feelings about him. Janet said she was told off for calling him ‘Dad’ — he insisted on ‘Joseph’. The former steelworker (right) admitted whipping Michael ‘with a switch [cane] and a belt’, but said later: ‘I’m glad I was tough, because look what I came out with. I came out with some kids that everybody loved all over the world.’
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW (1856-1950). The Nobel Prize and Oscar-winning playwright thought most apostrophes unnecessary and said: ‘There is not the faintest reason for persisting in the ugly and silly trick of peppering pages with these uncouth bacilli.’ But the Pygmalion writer wanted the alphabet to have 40 letters, not 26, and willed a big part of his estate to this cause.
ON JULY 26… IN 1895,
Marie Sklodowska and Pierre Curie married in France. In 1903, they became the first husband and wife to win the Nobel Prize in physics (for work on radiation).
IN 1908,
the Federal Bureau of Investigation, or FBI, was founded in Washington DC.
WORD WIZARDRY GUESS THE DEFINITION: Jentacular (1852)
A) Ill-balanced, shaky. B) Diagonally across from something else. C) Referring to breakfast. Answer below.
PHRASE EXPLAINED Buck up:
Meaning to summon up the courage to do something or to move on from something nasty. It comes from the American word ‘buck’ for a stag, a majestic animal. Thus to ‘buck up’ meant to tidy up one’s appearance and so cheer oneself up.
QUOTE FOR TODAY
THE artifice of being blonde has some incredible sort of sexual connotation. Madonna, U.S. pop star
JOKE OF THE DAY
THE inventor of the throat lozenge has died. There’ll be no coffin at his funeral.
Guess The Definition answer: C.