Today’s WOTD – 12 November 2012

parvenu

[pahr-vuh-noo, -nyoo, pahr-vuh-noo, -nyoo]

noun

1. a person who has recently or suddenly acquired wealth, importance, position, or the like, but has not yet developed the conventionally appropriate manners, dress, surroundings, etc.

adjective

2. being or resembling a parvenu.
3. characteristic of a parvenu.

Example sentence:

‘Many a parvenu despot has dealt swiftly and harshly with those who have opposed their forcible ascension to power’.

Today’s aphorism

‘Give a person a fish and you feed them for a day; teach that person to use the Internet and they won’t bother you for weeks’.
– Author Unknown

On this day

12 November 1927 – Josef Stalin takes full control of the Soviet Union after Leon Trotsky was expelled from the Communist Party a few weeks earlier.

12 November 1944 – sinking of the German battleship, Tirpitz. The Allies had tried for two years to sink the ship. Finally, 32 British Lancaster bombers attack and sink the ship.

12 November 1990 – Swiss computer scientist, Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web, publishes a formal proposal for hyper-text transfer, this followed his proposal for Information Management, published in March 1989. On 25 December 1990, he makes the world’s first successful communication between a hyper-text transfer protocol (HTTP) client and a server; and the world wide web is born. He is director of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) which oversees the ongoing development of the world-wide web.