A new online archive of Civil War letters offers a vivid portrait of the everyday lives of enlisted men. These soldiers lacked formal education so they wrote and spelled by ear. The letters show us how ordinary people spoke then. • Is there a single...
Private Voices, also known as the Corpus of American Civil War Letters, is an online archive of thousands of letters written by soldiers during the U.S. Civil War. Because the soldiers lacked formal education and wrote “by ear,” the...
velvet coup n.— «A senior official with Iran’s Revolutionary Guards, Brig. Gen. Yadollah Javani, was quoted by the official IRNA news agency as saying opposition leaders, including Mir Hussein Moussavi, who came second in the June 12...
rocket docket n.— «In a court system in which clerks get behind on scheduling trial dates by an additional 220 cases each and every day, Dallas” “proof or plea” docket is a big help, disposing of about 200 cases during...
two minute man n.— «The field race in a pure time trial format with the lowest ranked athletes going first up to the highest ranked who goes last. Athletes go at two minute intervals (this possibly needs to be tweaked a bit based on some...
burking n.— «A medical examiner testified during the trial that someone used great force that cut and bruised Carissimi’s face as she was held face-down on a muddy trail through woods on the island park in the Detroit River near downtown...