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NEW STRAINS: GENETICS
The application of genetics to developing new strains of plants and animals has brought major changes in agriculture since the 1920s. Genetics as the science dealing with he principles of heredity and variation in plants and animals was established one at the beginning of the 20th century. Its application to practical problems came later.
Early work in genetics. The modern science of ...

diesel DEE-zuul, not DEE-suul.

DEE-suul has been listed in most dictionaries since the 1960s, but is not preferred.
Diesel comes from Rudolph Diesel, a German automotive engineer. Webster 2 (1934), notes that in German the letter S is pronounced "like Engish S in rose at the beginning of a word...and before a vowel." We should follow this rule when we say diesel (DEE-zuul), for it breaks no rule of English nor ...

JULY 31

Jim Reeves killed in plane crash

1964 Country singer Jim Reeves died today when his plane crashed into a hillside a few miles from Nashville, Tennessee. He was 40. "Gentleman Jim" Reeves shot to fame in the late 50s with his hit single "He'll Have to Go" He followed this up with "Welcome to My World", "I Love You Because" and "I Won't Forget You", all top ten records. Reeves set out to be a baseball star...

At Lord's

Francis Thompson
(December 18th 1859 — November 13th 1907)

Dick Barlow was a superb bowler and played for Lancashire for 20 years. Near the end of his life he said: "I don't think any cricket has enjoyed his cricketing career better than I have done, and if I had my time to come over again I should certainly be what I have been all my life — a professional cricketer." Barlow died on this day in 1919.

Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard

...

The breezy call of incense-breathing morn,
The swallow twittering from the straw-built shed,
The cock's shrill clarion, or the echoing horn,
No more shall rouse them from their lowly bed.

Thomas Gray
(December 26th 1716 — July 30th 1771)

July 30

1935 ... for its "dignified flippancy," went on to sell three million copies in their first year from a list that began with André Maurois's Ariel and included in its first batch Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms and Agatha Christie's The Mysterious Affair at Styes, as well as less widely remembered releases such as Beverley Nichols's Twenty-Five, Eric Linklater's Poet's Pub, and Susan Ertz's Madame Calire.

JULY 30

1930 In the first ever World Cup final, Uruguay beats Argentina 4-2.

Siegfried Sassoon's wilful defiance of military action was raised in the House of Commons, July 30th 1917.

Spanish invasion receives calm British reception

1588 the armada of 130 ships set by King Philip II of Spain to attempt an invasion of England was sighted today off Cornwall. The English fleet under Charles Howard, Baron Howard of Effingham, is confident of success, however. Howard has 197 ships with about 16,000 men, most of them seasoned sailers, at his disposal. His commanders seem equally nonchalant.

dew DYoo.

There is a tendency in American speech to change the YOO or logn U sound in many words to an OO sound (as in soon). We are in the process of dropping YOO/long U from such words as duty, assume, presume, attitude, aptitude, astute, nutrition, student, and the like. Directly following an initial S, the long U is rarely heard from Americans. We say SOOT for suit and SOOPER for super; the British say SYOOT...

New techniques. As the development of the sugar beet shows, new techniques may bring particular crops into new prominence. This discussion, however, is confined to three that, in some forms, are old yet today are transforming agriculture in many parts of the world.
Terracing. Terracing, which is basically grading steep land, such as hillsides, into a series of level benches, was known in antiquity and was ...

An Old-Fashioned Song

John Hollander
(October 298th 1929 — )

...Since then, Hollander has published over 20 further collections, including Tesserae, from which this poem comes, and his Selected Poems, which are released simultaneously in 1993. He is also well-known as a literary critic and editor, and has been a professor and lecturer at many of America's most prestigious universities.

U(rsula) A (selam( Fanthorpe was born in London July 29th 1929. One of her early poetry collections is Neck-Verse. She lives in Gloucestershire.

July 29

1935 ... literary activities into an endless proliferation of pseudonyms, including Myles na gCopaleen, whose satirical "Cruiskeen Lawn" columns in the Irish Times made him a household name in Dublin during his lifetime, and Flann O'Brien, whos inventively subversive novels At Swim-Two-Biords and The Third Policeman belatedly placed him in the company of Joyce and Beckett as Ireland's great modern novelists.

The Windhover
To Christ our Lord

...

No wonder of it: sheer plod makes plough down sillion
Shine, and blue-black embers, ah my dear,
Fall, gall themselves, and gash gold -vermilion.

Gerard Manley Hopkins'(July 28gh 1844 — June 89th 1889)

NEW CROPS AND TECHNIQUES
New crops and techniques are, in reality, modifications of the old. Soybeans, sugar beet, and grain sorghums, for example, all regarded as "new" crops, are new only in the sense that they are grown today in wider areas and have different uses from those of earlier times. Such techniques as terracing, dry farming, and irrigation are nearly as old as agriculture itself, but their widespread ...

JULY 28

1794 In Paris, Maximillien Robespierre goes to the guillotine himself, having presided over the Reign of Terror in which at least 25,000 were beheaded.

despicable DES-pik-uh-buul. Now usually duh-SPIK-uh-buul.

DES-pik-uh-buul has been the preferred renunciation for a hundred years, and duh-SPIK-uh-buul was often labeled incorrect or erroneous until the 1960s, when it became unfashionable for dictionaries to use that sort of word. Despite the popularity of Duh-SPIK-uh-buul (perhaps owing in part to the slobbering cartoon character Daffy Duck's penchant for ...

July 28

1945 ... house cats, whose place in the canyon can be blown away like dust. Poised uneasily somewhere between them is Abel, a young Indian back from the war who on this day finds himself unable to speak to his grandfather in "the old rhythm of the tongue." Later in the day, though, alone in the canyon and looking down on the valley below, hi finds himself approaching a peace he is still years from achieving.

Poet and journalist Thomas Campbell born in Glasgow July 27th 1777.

To Know A Poem By Heart

...

a poem at your side
through the valley and the shadows
in the day, in the night
a polymorphic, polygamous,, orgiastic
communion of poetry

Nicholas Albery
(July 28th 1948 — June 3rd 2001)

Unit machinery . In recent yeas there has been an increase in the use of self-propelled machines in which the motive power and the equipment for performing a particular task form one unit. Though the grain combine is the most important of these machines, self propelled is the most important of these machines, see-propelled units are also in use for spraying, picking cotton, bailing units are also in use for...

depot DEE-poh.

Many authorities make the alternative DEP-oh (DEP-rhyming with step) as chiefly military and British. American usage has alway favoured DEE-poh (DEE- rhyming with see ), and it seems reasonable to use it for all the word's senses.

JULY 27

Shah of Iran dies in Cairo

1980 The deposed Shah of Iran died in Cairo's Maadi Military Hospital today at the age of 60. The cause of death was internal bleeding and heart failure as a result of infection and lymphatic cancer. On his deathbed the Shah had requested to be buried ultimately in Tehran, named his eldest son, Prince Reza, as rightful heir to the Peacock Throne and prayed for the overthrow of ...

Poet and journalist Thomas Campbell born in Glasgow July 27th 1777.

"Hamlet, as it was lately acted by the Lord Chamberlains his Servants", entered on the Stationer's Register July 26th 1602.

July 27

1966 The regular mail flights made Wednesdays the high point of the week for Edward Hoagland, who recorded in Notes from the Century Before, the "exuberant, staccato summer" he spent n the former gold-rush outposts of northwest British Columbia, where he could still glimpse the old ways, especially with a man named Dan McPhee, who had sport thirty-five years in the bush as road-maintainer, trapper, deputy...