Today’s WOTD – 4 November 2012

Pollyanna

(pol-ee-AN-uh)

noun

– A naively cheerful and optimistic person.

ETYMOLOGY:
After Pollyanna Whittier, heroine of novels by Eleanor Porter (1868-1920). Pollyanna is an indefatigable optimist and teaches everyone to play the “glad game”: find something to be glad about, no matter what tragedy befalls. Earliest documented use: 1917.

USAGE:
“So the doctrine of positive thinking does not require you to close your eyes and ears to the world. It does not require you to become a Pollyanna, calling everything wonderful, no matter how horrid it is.”
A Thought About Negative Thinking; Deccan Chronicle (India); Sep 16, 2012.

Today’s aphorism

‘The best place to find a helping hand, is at the end of your own arm’.

– Swedish proverb

On this day

4 November 1926 – British archeologist, Howard Carter, discovers steps leading to the tomb of the Pharoah Tutankhamen.

4 November 1979 – Students loyal to the Ayatollah Khomeini over-run the U.S. Embassy in Tehran and take 90 Americans hostage in protest against the former Shah of Iran being allowed into the U.S. for medical treatment. The hostages were held for 14 months and released after the U.S. government promised $5 billion in foreign aid and unfroze $3 billion of Iranian funds. During the crisis, President Jimmy Carter attempted an unsuccessful rescue mission by helicopter, which ended in the deaths of 8 U.S. marines.

4 November 1995 – assassination of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin. The assassin was Yigal Amir, an Israeli right-wing Zionist, who opposed the signing of the Oslo Peace Accords in which Rabin had negotiated a peace plan with the Palestinian Liberation Organisation.