12 November 2013

valediction

[val-i-dik-shuhn]

noun

1. an act of bidding farewell or taking leave.
2. an utterance, oration, or the like, given in bidding farewell or taking leave; valedictory.

Origin:

1605–15; < Latin valedictiōn- (stem of valedictiō ), equivalent to valedict ( us ), past participle of valedīcere ( vale farewell + dictus, past participle of dīcere to say) + -iōn- -ion

Today’s aphorism

Dealing with backstabbers, there was one thing I learned. They’re only powerful when you got your back turned.

– Eminem (Marshall Mathers III)

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.