4 January 2016

concilliabule

[kohn-sil-lee-uh-byul]

noun

– a secret meeting or secret plans of people who are hatching a plot.

Example

Cabinet’s concilliabule to overthrow the Prime Minister was enacted after the most recent opinion poll.

Anagram

lineal bucolic
albino ice cull

Today’s quote

To love our neighbor as ourselves is such a truth for regulating human society, that by that alone one might determine all the cases in social morality.

– John Locke

On this day

4 January – the eleventh day of the 12 days of Christmas (Western Christianity).

4 January 1903 – Thomas Edison electrocutes an elephant to prove the dangers of ‘alternating current’ electricity. He had previously electrocuted stray cats and dogs and even horses and cows. He snidely referred to it as ‘getting Westinghoused’. Topsy, the elephant, had squashed 4 trainers at the Luna Park Zoo on Coney Island, so the zoo had decided to hang her, before someone suggested she ‘ride the lightning’. More on this at http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/news/2008/01/dayintech_0104

4 January 1965 – death of Thomas Stearns Eliot (T.S. Eliot), poet, playwright, publisher, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, described as ‘arguably the most important English language poet of the 20th century’. Wrote ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock‘, ‘The Waste Land‘, ‘Ash Wednesday‘, ‘The Hollow Men‘. Born 26 September 1888.